Confessions of a New York Taxi Driver
Eugene Salomon
Driving a cab for more than 30 years Gene Salomon has collected a remarkable selection of stories. He shares the very best in this unforgettable memoir.Eugene has had everyone in the back of his cab: Lauren Bacall, Leonardo di Caprio, John McEnroe, Sean Penn and Dennis Hopper, Simon and Garfunkel, Robin Williams, Norman Mailer, Diane Keaton and, yes, even Kevin Bacon.He’s taken all sorts of people for a ride: Mafiosi, hookers, the rich and famous, down and outs, young lovers, tourists from every corner of the globe, lifetime New Yorkers, passengers in a rush, and others with no particular place to go.So sit back and enjoy the ride, but remember . . . the meter’s running.
CONFESSIONS OF A NEW YORK TAXI DRIVER
Eugene Salomon
Dedication (#u1e929d66-f408-5772-8f39-81c37a8f0f63)
There are certain rides in which the rapport between passenger and driver is so great that the only way to bring the conversation to a proper conclusion is a handshake. I dedicate this book to every passenger who ever shook my hand at the end of the ride. Except the drunks. That doesn’t count.
And to Harry Gongola, Doctor of Chiropractic, former NYC taxi driver and my very first passenger.
Contents
Dedication (#u6a1164d9-2757-5108-b24e-91c6429c4a35)
Introduction: A Conversation With the Human Race (#u27452f09-7b48-5ff0-ae13-894d800c7639)
1 The Wildest Ride (#u8efeddbd-58b0-5842-bd6f-5dbefe4dbdce)
2 Big City Crime (#u3ed31296-7baa-5afc-9a00-5df2a1090c41)
3 Changes (#u3f2cb1c0-21e6-593d-aa0c-b716411fa477)
4 Celebrities (#u99d481aa-27cb-5381-983d-7d46ca551661)
5 Extreme behavior (#litres_trial_promo)
6 Fare Beaters (#litres_trial_promo)
7 Means of Exchange (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Hustlers, Hustlers, Hustlers (#litres_trial_promo)
9 Pedestrians (#litres_trial_promo)
10 Road Rage (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Karma versus Coincidence (#litres_trial_promo)
12 The Animals of Manhattan (#litres_trial_promo)
13 In a Rush (#litres_trial_promo)
14 The Traffic Jam Hall of Fame (#litres_trial_promo)
15 Solids, Liquids and Gases (#litres_trial_promo)
16 ‘Taxi!’ (#litres_trial_promo)
17 At Journey’s End (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copright (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION A conversation with the human race (#u1e929d66-f408-5772-8f39-81c37a8f0f63)
A man jumped into my cab one night in April, 2008, at the corner of 5
Avenue and 57
Street. He was a forty-something businessman type, an Inquisitario (a passenger who asks a lot of questions) as it turned out, en route to Grand Central Station.
I could see he was a bit disoriented as he settled into the back seat, but this is not unusual in New York. Certain things must be confronted by a passenger as he enters a yellow cab in this city. Things like: how much will this ride cost? Do I have enough cash or will I have to use a credit card? Hey, what in hell is the source of that odor? And, since English is usually a cabbie’s second language, does the driver actually understand a word I’m saying?
So it took him a few moments before it dawned on him. Leaning forward in his seat, he studied me carefully.
‘Say,’ he blurted out, ‘you’re an… American!’
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but you know I charge extra for that.’
He ignored the joke.
‘You’re the first American driver I’ve had in… three years!’
‘Better play the lottery tonight.’
‘Really!’
I know how monkeys feel when people are staring at them in the zoo. There are indeed very few American taxi drivers in New York City. My passenger’s eyes moved from the back of my head to my hack license.
‘Eugene Salomon,’ he said, not realizing in his excitement that I already knew my own name.
‘That’s me.’
‘Tell me something, Mr Salomon… how long have you been driving a cab?’
‘You don’t have a heart condition or anything, do you?’
‘No.’
‘Well, then, I’ll tell you… I have been driving a cab since… (drum roll, please)… 1977.’
There was a short pause as this information was processed, and then the expected response: ‘Oh my God!’ This is said in the same combination of horror and amazement people have when they see someone being hit by a car. I take it in my stride.
‘Wow,’ my passenger said, ‘you must have some stories!’
‘Buddy,’ I say in a well-rehearsed reply, ‘I have more stories than the Empire State Building…’
The taxis
And I do.
If you make driving a cab in New York City your career you will get no pension, no paid vacations, no overtime and no health benefits. But you will get a collection of stories. It’s inevitable. It comes with the job.
Why is this so? Let’s take a minute to examine what taxi driving in this, the Monster City of the World, is all about. Especially if you’re not a New Yorker (yet), a review of the basics is in order.
We are all familiar with the image of a street in New York that is filled to the brim with yellow taxicabs. It’s a part of the landscape here. How many taxis are there? The answer is 13,237, a quantity that is determined by the city government. Why so many? (Or so few, if you’ve been standing in the rain for half an hour trying to get one?) Well, Manhattan, the borough where the great majority of these cabs can be found, is an island that is thirteen miles in length and two miles in width. One and a half million people live on this island and almost none of them own a car – there’s no room for cars! So for many New Yorkers a taxi is a daily means of getting around town. Add to that the million tourists who are here every day and the more than a million commuters who are also here every day and you get an idea of why taxicabs are so important to life in the city.
In New York you can walk out into the street, wave your hand in the air (known as a ‘hail’), and before you can whistle ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, a big yellow taxi will zip up to you and stop, making itself available for your grand entrance. Your carriage awaits you, sir! Or madam.
Consider how marvelous this is. What convenience! In most places you must call on the phone for a taxi and wait for that taxi to arrive, if it arrives at all. But the population of Manhattan is so dense that it makes the street-hail system workable. Hand goes up, taxi arrives. Amazing!
And the driver of that taxi is required by law to take you anywhere in the city you want to go. He cannot legally refuse you. Of course, it is an imperfect world and if you want to go to Brooklyn in the middle of the evening rush hour, you may be refused every once in a while. In fact, you deserve to be refused if you want to go to Brooklyn at that time! But, generally speaking, your driver will take you anywhere in the city you want to go. Again, this is an amazing convenience, if you think about it.
So we have here a system of thousands of taxis, all in competition with each other, cruising the streets and constantly looking for their next customer – anyone with his hand in the air. (Yes, I have stopped for people who were actually looking at their watches, pointing at buildings, or waving goodbye to their friends. And I have stopped not once, but twice, for a statue of a man hailing a cab on East 47
Street!)
The passengers
Anyway, who are all these people with their hands in the air? What kinds of people get into taxicabs in New York City? There are two broad categories: visitors and residents.
Who are the visitors? Well, maybe it’s not everyone, but it seems like it is. New York has been called the Capital of the World, the City That Never Sleeps, Gotham, the Big Apple and other nicknames. As already mentioned, I call it the Monster City of the World. But whatever you want to call it, it is certainly a place where people from all over the planet converge. Sometimes I imagine that everyone in the world is standing in line in a single file. And then, one by one, they all get into my cab.
The variety is infinite. I am convinced that every conceivable type of person from every conceivable place is well represented in this city. From wide-eyed teenagers from Tennessee here on a school trip to middle-aged Barry Manilow groupies from England following the singer all around the country, or to an old couple from San Diego returning to the city after a forty-year absence – they all get into my cab. People from Turkey, people from Brazil; people from Estonia, people from Taiwan; I actually once had a passenger from Liechtenstein, a country in Europe that’s so small it would fit into the trunk of my cab!
Most passengers, however (about eighty percent by my own estimate), are people who live in or close to the city. They can be broken down into seven main groups:
1. The Workerbees – these are the folks who either commute to and from the suburbs, live above 96
Street in Manhattan, or reside in the neighborhoods of the outer boroughs (Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island). I define ‘neighborhood’ as a place where families live and kids can be seen playing with other kids without supervision. Due to the extremely high price of real estate, with the exception of the Lower East Side, there are basically no neighborhoods left in Manhattan south of 96
Street. The WorkerbeesI get in my cab are usually either en route to the boroughs or coming from or going to the train and bus stations of Manhattan.
2. The American Aristocracy – these are the people on the upper end of the food chain who were born into wealth and privilege. They live in specific places: 5
Avenue and Park Avenue between 60
and 96
Streets. Here we find ‘high society’ – prep schools, trust funds, debutante balls, charity events and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And, yes, as a rule they are no better than average tippers.
3. The Comfortables – this group consists of those who are doing quite well, thank you, and can actually afford to live in Manhattan. They may have been called ‘Yuppies’ (Young Urban Professionals) at one time, but the truth is most of them aren’t that young anymore. But urban and professional they certainly are. They can be found anywhere in Manhattan, but are most often in Midtown, the Upper West Side, Tribeca and Soho, with some hearty pioneers buying up brownstones in Brooklyn and Harlem.
4. The Gonnabees – it’s been written that ‘big dreams come to New York, small dreams stay home’. More than anywhere else in America, New York is the place where ambitious people come to make their mark. These are the Gonnabees. A Wannabee is someone with a small dream who stays home; a Gonnabee takes the leap and arrives in New York City come hell or high rentals. Most Gonnabees are in their twenties. The artistic ones can be found in the East Village, Alphabet City, the Lower East Side, and, currently, extending over the borders of Manhattan into the Williamsburg and Greenpoint sections of Brooklyn. The rest of the Gonnabees are pursuing careers in business and are sharing apartments in the Upper East Side or Midtown.
5. The Unmoveables – they can’t afford to live in Manhattan, but they’re too hooked to ever leave. These are the Gonnabees who never made it to the Comfortables. They range in age from thirty-five to ninety and could be anywhere in Manhattan, probably in a rent-stabilized apartment.
6. The Flying Cosmopolitans – wealthy, successful and smart, these are people from other countries or other parts of the United States who own apartments in New York but are here only occasionally. They could be living anywhere in Manhattan, but never in the boroughs. In fact, most of them have probably never even been to the boroughs except to pass through Queens on their way to the airport.
7. The Flying Workerbees – these people are working-class nomads from other places who are toiling in New York for extended periods of time and, in the case of Americans, may even commute back home on the weekends. They are either in Midtown or not far from Midtown. Both the Flying Workerbees and the Flying Cosmopolitans aren’t really residents and aren’t exactly visitors either. They fall in the middle. But there are enough of them in taxicabs to be recognizable as distinct types of passengers.
The rides
So these are the kinds of people who get into taxis in New York City (along with an occasional dog). And what about the ride itself? What happens during a ride in a taxicab? There are three possibilities.
The first: nothing. The driver drives and the passenger looks out the window or watches the damned television which the city has mandated to be in the rear compartment of every yellow cab. The second: the driver is a fly on the wall. He finds himself the sudden observer of a scene in the passengers’ lives. Middle-aged siblings are discussing their mother’s medical condition and the driver is just along for the ride. Literally. Or two movie stars (Sean Penn and Dennis Hopper) hop in and talk to each other about – what else? – old movies.
And then there is the third possibility… a conversation takes place. And this is where it gets interesting.
Cab drivers and their passengers find themselves in a unique human situation. It’s a business relationship but, like barbers and bartenders, it’s a relationship that shares a close space for a limited length of time. Due to these factors the shell that divides strangers is easily shattered by the act of communication, and the potential for just about any kind of conversation exists.
Politics, sports, what’s in the news today – these are common grounds for discussion, as well as the endless spectacle of whatever’s passing by on the street. Of course, you never know where a conversation may lead you. Sometimes it may take you into something that might be called an ‘adventure’. Like the summer day in 1984 when I picked up a man on 56
Street who was wearing white shorts and holding half a dozen tennis racquets in his arms. He turned out to be Martina Navratilova’s coach and was headed out to Douglaston in Queens for a practice session. Thirty minutes later I am standing on a tennis court with one of Martina’s racquets in my hand, trying to return the serve of a tennis pro. And Martina herself sits patiently watching as her coach has some fun with me.
Other times a conversation may flow so easily that the passenger and the driver find themselves talking to each other as if they were the closest of friends. I remember once bringing an elderly man, traveling alone, from LaGuardia Airport to Manhattan. There was a nice rapport between us, and this man told me about his life. He was one of the four Shorin brothers who had founded the Topps chewing gum company. He told me about the problems they’d had obtaining the raw materials used in making gum during World War II, and of the enduring love he had for his deceased brothers. ‘It was one for all and all for one,’ he said, as tears streamed down his face.
Others – on the assumption that the driver doesn’t know who they are and will never see them again – will spill out their guts about things they probably wouldn’t reveal to even their closest confidants. A man once bragged to me, for example, about how he cheated the city out of $80,000: he broke his leg at home but claimed he’d tripped at a municipal construction site and used his girlfriend as a false witness. Another time a man jumped into my cab in a true frenzy. Bouncing through emotions of anger and grief like a rubber ball, he wailed that he’d just been in a fight in a bar – and he thinks he may have killed another man.
Still others, trying to get a bargain by using their driver as a therapist, will ask for advice about anything from career changes, boyfriends and the stock market to how to buy a used car, how to make up a good excuse to his wife, or how to defrost a bagel. Amazingly enough, as years go by a taxi driver finds himself an expert in all these things and it turns out the passenger was wise to have sought his counsel.
So what it all comes down to is this: millions of people from every corner of the Earth - from Kathmandu to Katz’s deli - are jammed together on a small island called Manhattan. They get into taxicabs and talk with their drivers. Communication occurs. And as years go by, a cabbie, looking back, will realize he has been having encounters, perhaps even connections, if not with every person on the planet, then certainly with every type of person on the planet.
He has been having, you might say, a conversation with the human race.
So jump in. Let’s think of reading this book as being like taking a ride in my cab, except without the potholes. You want stories? I’ve got stories. You want opinions? I’ve got opinions. You want advice? Now why would you want my advice about… that? Well, since you asked, I happen to be something of a streetwise scholar on that subject, so my advice you will get.
But where do we start? Well, I think we should begin with the question every single person asks me immediately after they say, ‘Wow, you must have some stories…’
1 The Wildest Ride (#u1e929d66-f408-5772-8f39-81c37a8f0f63)
‘What was the wildest ride you ever had?’
I have been asked this question so many times that you would think after all these years I would have a quick response to it. But I don’t.
The problem is there have been so many. Was it the girl who rushed out of the cab seven times to puke? Or was it the guy who, without the slightest provocation, would just start screaming? Or the basket case who got out of the cab in the middle of the 59
Street Bridge? Or the one who got out in the middle of the Williamsburg Bridge?
Hmmmmmm…
Maybe it was the poor guy who was mugged while sitting in the back seat. Or the perfectly nice couple going home to Brooklyn who found themselves sitting between two cops who commandeered the taxi into the middle of a crime scene.
‘Yeah,’ I think, ‘that must have been the wildest’ – but then I remember the ride with the Mafia hit men – and I just can’t decide.
So what I do is this. When people ask me for my wildest ride, I ask them for a little help.
‘What’s your definition of “wild”?’ I ask. This actually makes it more fun for me. It’s my contention that I have some kind of a story for any category they can think of.
But I started to notice a pattern whenever I would ask this. First there is a pause. Then some giggling. And then, the BIG QUESTION: ‘Has anyone had – sex! – in your cab?’
Always ready with a quip, my reply is: ‘You mean tonight?’
‘No, no,’ they say with big smiles, ‘ever.’
Soooo… this is what’s on everybody’s mind (surprise, surprise!). Well, who am I to deny the public what they want? What I’m going to do is rename this chapter. Let’s call it…
Sex and the taxi
…and start all over again.
Okay, admit it. Sure you want stories about crime, hustlers, eccentric people and the gritty charm of New York City. But the first thing you want is sex. So let’s confront this like adults, shall we? Once we get this sex chapter out of the way we can all breathe a lot easier and then move on to loftier pursuits.
So, do people have sex in taxis?
Yes. Not nearly so often as you’d think if you’ve ever seen the Taxicab Confessions program on TV, but, yes, it does happen. There are three stages.
1. Cuddling – two passengers get in and sit quite close to each other in the back seat. A head may rest upon the other’s shoulder. There is some polite kissing. It’s all within the bounds of acceptable public behavior.
2. Foreplay – there is suspicious movement going on in the rear. The kissing is passionate. There is no interest in any conversation with the driver. You look in the mirror and, where there were once two heads, there is now only one. They’re doing something with their hands, but you’re not sure what. It’s time to adjust the mirror and turn off the radio.
3. Outright fucking – if there are three and a half million people in Manhattan at any given time, then there must be something like two million beds. But apparently that is not enough. When a couple assumes the ‘taxicab position’ – the guy sits facing forward and the girl straddles him, facing the rear window – then you know they’re adding ‘taxicab’ to their list of places where they’ve ‘done it’.
One of the age-old questions is how should the driver react when he realizes that, only five feet behind him, and separated merely by a Plexiglas partition with an open window, the cucumber is entering the salad bowl? Should he consider this to be the epitome of rude behavior and throw the passengers out? Or should he take it as a compliment that they would feel so – what’s the word? –comfortable in his space?
With me, I do find it offensive but my level of resentment seems to depend on the way the passengers go about it. While I’ve never thrown anyone out of my cab for this most out of place conduct, I do get annoyed if they’re pretending I’m not even there. I have two ways of dealing with the irritation: 1) take extremely sharp left and right turns in an effort to knock the female off to the side; 2) charge them an extra ten dollars for the ‘hotel room’.
So it’s kind of oddly refreshing when a couple has such balls (sorry, couldn’t help myself) that they make no attempt to hide the fact that they are intending to have sex right there in the back seat and they tell me so as the ride begins. It went down that way one night in the East Village…
Lust, cured
A guy and a girl came out of the Bowery Bar on East 4
Street late one night and jumped into my cab. The guy gave me their destination, 24
Street and 2
Avenue, and moved halfway across the seat to make room for the girl. As she closed the door behind her she blurted out, ‘You don’t mind if we have sex in your cab, do you?’ in the same way someone else might ask if it would be all right if she smoked a cigarette. Then she pushed the guy down flat on his back.
Before I could get the quip ‘I charge extra for that’ out of my mouth, she was on him like a Fido on a leg. It turned out it didn’t matter if I minded or not, there was going to be a party on the back seat. Although I appreciated her outrageous effrontery, I wasn’t too happy about having to suffer the discomfort I was already beginning to feel. But it was a short ride and I decided it would be better to endure it for five minutes than it would be to raise an objection. So we were on our way.
I drove half a block and hit a red light at the first intersection. As I came to a stop, I noticed something – parked next to the curb, immediately to my left, was a police car with two cops inside. There was a male cop behind the wheel and a female cop in the passenger seat to his right. Both of them were staring with great interest at the spectacle occurring on the back seat.
The female cop looked at me as I was looking at her. The expression on my face said, ‘I am enduring the torture of serving in a professional capacity two animals who don’t have the decency to care how their actions are affecting other people.’
I rolled down my window. She rolled down hers.
‘Is this legal?’ I asked, the tone of my voice implying that it would be great if she could find a way to bring a little justice to the situation.
She was right on it. She picked up her microphone (all police cars in New York have sound systems) and, with a big smile on her face, went to work.
‘Hey, you back there in the taxi!’ her voice boomed, ‘What are you doing back there?’
My passengers remained oblivious to the proclamation and continued humping on each other. People on the street, however, had begun to take notice.
‘Hey, no sex in taxis!’
Now everyone within earshot was staring at them and beginning to enjoy the show.
‘Hey, you, lady in the taxi – get off of that guy right now!’
The girl looked up. Suddenly realizing that she was making the day of about a dozen people on the street and, worse, was under direct orders from the police to cease copulation, she dismounted in horror.
‘That’s better! Now behave yourselves!’
There were still about ten seconds left before the light turned green. People near the intersection were laughing and one man actually began to applaud. It must have seemed like an hour to my passengers before that light finally turned green and they escaped from the scene of their public humiliation. And, you know, that little jaunt up to 24
and 2
turned out to be as calm and sober as a ride to church on a Sunday morning with the minister and his missus.
Funny how passion can turn on and then suddenly disappear, isn’t it? Go figure.
Awkward, defined
I was driving down Perry Street in Greenwich Village one evening when a pretty, blonde-haired twenty-something darted from the sidewalk and hailed me with what I noticed was an above-average determination. Most people just raise their hand and get in. This one was different – she had an agenda.
‘Could you wait here for a minute?’ she asked.
No problem. I pulled the cab into an open space near the curb and started the meter as my passenger-to-be returned to a townhouse and called out to someone. A second blonde emerged from the residence and was escorted to the cab by the first blonde. There was a brief conversation between the two of them and then, to my surprise, the front right door opened and the second blonde was ushered in beside me by her friend, who then walked back toward the townhouse.
‘You’re going to sit up here?’ I asked the second blonde.
‘I guess so,’ she said in what might have been an Eastern European accent. She seemed a bit confused.
I knew something was up. This never happens.
After a few more moments Blonde Number One, who turned out to be an American, returned, but she was not alone. She had with her a good-looking guy – dark hair, about thirty years old. They jumped into the back seat and sat together the way lovers always do – no distance between them and their eyes locked into each other.
‘We’re going to Brooklyn,’ the female voice from the back said. ‘Seeley Street,’ said the guy, ‘take the Prospect to the 10
Avenue exit.’
I drove down Perry Street to 7
Avenue South and made a right.
‘Do you want the Brooklyn Bridge or the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel?’ I asked.
‘Whatever’s faster,’ the female voice said.
‘The tunnel’s faster but there’s a four-dollar toll. Is that okay with you?’
No answer. The couple in the back seat had already reached the point of defining everything but themselves as the outside world and shutting it off. Which is to say, they were kissing, fondling, and doing whatever with significant energy. I started driving toward the tunnel.
I knew immediately that I had entered a twilight zone of human behavior. It’s one thing to have passengers groping each other in the back seat. But to have passengers groping each other in the back seat while a pretty girl sits next to me in the front seat in what was going to be a long ride… now that is quite another thing. I tried to think of something to say to her to fend off what I sensed could become the mother of all awkward situations.
‘Where are you from?’ I asked.
‘Estonia,’ she said, in that accent.
‘Estonia… Estonia… I know that’s somewhere. Where is that?’
‘Near it is to Finland.’
‘Ohhhh… it was part of the Soviet Union?’
‘Yes.’
Well, I felt I was getting somewhere. I could talk to her about what life was like in Estonia and what had changed since the breakup of the Soviet Union; we could chat about New York City; hey, we could even talk about Finland. Her friends in the back seat would settle down and the two of us up here could have a polite little conversation all the way to Brooklyn.
Yeah, right.
What happened next was the equivalent in the taxi world of being slapped in the face. Blonde Number One disengaged herself momentarily from her stud, reached forward, and slammed the partition window closed. This is a major faux pas as far as the driver is concerned as the partition is there for his protection, not for the privacy of the passengers – not that a closed partition window really offers any privacy, anyway. Under the circumstances, however, I thought it was perhaps not a bad idea and I decided to ignore the insult and attempt to continue the conversation with Estonia.
‘Uh, so how long have you been in the United States?’
‘A year and one half.’
‘All the time in New York City?’
‘For mostly, yes.’
‘Do you like New York?’
‘Yes, it is wonderful city, exciting city.’
We were approaching West Street, the major thoroughfare that leads to the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel. The activity in the back seat had calmed down just a bit and could, with some liberal thinking, be accepted as just a couple of crazy kids showing affection for one another. They laughed and chattered and pecked at each other like two canaries in a cage. It was kind of cute in its way and it allowed the bland conversation in the front seat to continue. Block by block I was learning more about life in the post-Soviet Estonia. It was starting to sound like a place I might want to visit someday.
And then we entered the tunnel.
Apparently this is what they’d been waiting for – the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel of Love. Blonde Number One immediately got herself on top of The Stud and went at him. Not in the more discreet taxicab position but flat out across the seat. Their thumping and bumping could be felt through the floorboard and her encouraging cries of ‘Yeah baby that’s it yeah baby oh yeah that’s it baby!’ could be heard quite distinctly up front. There could be no ignoring it: the canaries were fucking and they were fucking hard.
I glanced meekly to my right. Estonia’s eyes were staring down at the area around her feet in a complete non-confront of the situation. Her problem wasn’t only her selfish friend in the back seat. Her problem was me. And my problem was her.
When two people are sitting together in the front seat of a car they are sharing a close, almost intimate space. That’s why females usually do not sit up front with the driver when four passengers get into a taxi – the front seat is usually taken by a guy. It’s just a bit uncomfortable for a woman to be sharing that close a space with a man she doesn’t know. And what we had here was more than ‘a bit uncomfortable’. It was right up there with the recurring dream some people have of walking down a crowded street only to discover that they aren’t wearing any pants. It was at that level of uncomfortable.
Nevertheless I made a snap decision to tough it out. I would continue my conversation with Estonia. But I couldn’t pretend that there weren’t two people fucking just inches behind us. I felt it would lighten the situation if we acknowledged what was going on. Better to stare the tiger straight in the eye.
‘Uh… so how do the three of you know each other?’ I asked.
Estonia moved her eyes upward from the floor and looked out through the windshield toward the tunnel in front of us. She was coming out of her trance.
‘In restaurant we work together,’ she said.
‘You’re a cook?’
‘No, no, am waitress.’ She turned her head and motioned in the direction of the back seat. ‘She is waitress also.’
‘And him?’
‘He is manager.’
‘Have they been going with each other for a long time?’
‘No, no, this is new.’
‘So you had no idea they’d be doing… this?’
‘No!’
So now I understood. Estonia was the unwitting accomplice of her sexually adventurous friend, as was I. With this shared reality I sensed that a small, yet perhaps meaningful bond had been created between us. We were both pawns in Blonde Number One’s game and we had to support each other. I felt a stirring of affinity within me. Did she feel the same way? I glanced over at her ever so slightly. Was she smiling or was this the way her face normally looked?
I considered the situation. I’m a man. Generally speaking, I am attracted to women. There are two people in the seat back there making love as if to say that everyone should be making love. The attractive girl sitting next to me seems to like me, maybe. I’m single again. Hey, this could be a gift from the gods. Should I cross the line of professional conduct and make a move?
At the end of the tunnel there is a toll to be paid, so I slowed down as we approached the booth. Blonde Number One and The Stud used this opportunity to take a brief rest, their faces popping up with grins on them that I would have to say could only be described as ‘shit-eating’. Then, as we picked up speed after the toll and were on the highway, they switched positions – The Stud now on top – and went back to work.
I knew I had only a short time to make a move if indeed a move was to be made because we would be at Seeley Street within five minutes. I tried to think of something to say or do that would give Estonia the idea that perhaps we should join her friends in this crazy, impromptu orgy. But I couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t make me come off as a complete jackass, so I did what in certain circles I am well known for doing – nothing. Nevertheless I felt that if I could somehow keep the conversation going, who knows? It might lead to something. So I turned toward her with the intention of making words come out of my mouth.
It was then that I noticed that Estonia had found herself a way out of the situation. She did what ostriches have been doing for millions of years. She closed her eyes, tilted her head to one side, and seemed to be pretending that she was asleep.
Apparently the orgy would remain in the back seat. I put my eyes back on the road, picked up some speed, and said to hell with it, I’d rather keep my dignity and my professionalism. But, then again, if she would just give me a sign perhaps I could regain my dignity and professionalism, uh, tomorrow.
But there was no sign. The ride from hell went on like this – Estonia pretending to be asleep and myself looking for something, anything – for a few more minutes until we finally did arrive at Seeley Street. Actually I had a feeling of relief when we pulled up in front of their building as, thank God, the ordeal was over at last. Blonde Number One and The Stud pranced from the back seat without the slightest hint of embarrassment, all smiles. The Stud then handed me a $10 tip on top of the amount on the meter, a worthy gesture that didn’t really make up for the stress I had been caused to endure, but it did make me feel a bit better about things. The best thing, however, was that I was rid of them and could get on with the complacency of my daily grind.
Or so I thought.
Like the trick ending of a horror movie where you think the psycho is dead but then somehow he’s coming at you again with a butcher knife, there was more.
After a brief conversation with Blonde Number One, Estonia decided to continue on with the ride. What she’d thought was going to be a night of hanging out with her friends had become a sex party for them but not for her. So what was the point of staying? She’d rather just go home. And home, it turned out, was several more minutes into Brooklyn.
I thought she would move from the front to the back and make the whole spatial arrangement more comfortable for the two of us. But no – she stayed up front with me! Now it would be just the two of us alone in the front seat. What had been perhaps the most awkward situation theoretically possible between a man and a woman who didn’t know each other had actually taken a turn for the worse. This was even more awkward.
I pulled out and headed for Ocean Parkway. It would be an eight-minute ride on that road until we reached Avenue P, where she lived. Once again, the tension of the situation gripped me. What was she thinking? Was her staying up front with me a clue that I was supposed to act on? What should I do? What should I do?
Well, I wish I could tell you that the ride ended in a mutually enjoyable fling that I could smile about when reminiscing about my sexual adventures. But the truth is a woman has to just about rip her clothes off and dance the hula before I get the message. Estonia and I continued to chit-chat all the way to Avenue P as if the debauchery we had just witnessed had not really happened. She paid me the additional fare and left with a slight smile on her face. At least it kind of looked like a smile.
But it wasn’t all for nothing. In the course of the remainder of the ride I learned that Estonia, the country, is bordered by Latvia to the south, Russia to the east, and the Gulf of Finland to the north; that the capital city is called Tallinn; that most people are Lutherans; and that it’s a great place to raise cattle.
Fascinating stuff. Really hope to visit that place someday.
Multi-tasking
Multi-tasking. It’s a concept that’s gained quite of bit of popularity recently. The guy with a cell phone in one hand, watching a computer screen, reading a report and eating his lunch – all at the same time – is an image of the modern age. Why should it be any different in a taxicab?
I was cruising in Hell’s Kitchen at around 1 a.m. on a cool, December night when a short, thickset guy – pale, white skin, slick black hair, about twenty-five years old – hailed me at 45
and 9
. A skinny, black girl, somewhere between sixteen and twenty, I would say, followed him into the back seat. I could see by the way they sat some distance apart that there was no great affinity between them.
I started driving down 9
Avenue expecting to hear what our destination would be, but there was nothing.
‘Where are you going?’ I asked.
‘Make your next left,’ the guy said.
‘Okay.’
I turned left onto 44
Street but hit some traffic halfway down the block. We came to a halt.
‘How long you been drivin’ tonight?’ he asked.
‘Since five o’clock.’
‘Busy tonight?’
‘Not bad for a Tuesday,’ I said, ‘but things get slow after midnight.’ The guy was showing signs of being a conversationalist. I liked that.
After nearly a minute we approached the intersection at 8
Avenue, but there was still no decision as to what our destination would be.
‘Go left?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, make the left and make another left a few blocks up the avenue,’ he replied.
‘On which street?’
‘Whichever one you want.’
Now this was weird. I immediately began to wonder why a passenger wouldn’t care where I was going. The first thing I thought of was that he didn’t intend to pay me for the ride so he didn’t care how high the meter ran. But this guy didn’t appear to me to be a flight risk. He just wasn’t that type.
I looked at him again in the mirror. I noticed that I could see him but not her. There are only two explanations for this phenomenon: 1) they are cuddling with her head resting on his lap, facing upward, or 2) they are not cuddling and her head is facing downward… and you know what that means. Based on my prior observation that there was no particular love between them, I knew it was number two – this guy was getting a blowjob!
Well, at least I understood why he didn’t care where I drove. The girl, I now surmised, was a hooker. My taxi had been turned into a brothel and, although I might have had cause to be offended, the guy had shown manners by asking me how my night had been going, and that was enough for me not to take issue with his behavior. I drove up 8
Avenue and made a left on 53
, not expecting to hear anything but some grunts and perhaps some squishy noises coming from the back seat. So it came as quite a surprise that he resumed our conversation when we stopped for a red light at 53
and 9
.
‘Hey, you wanna hear something wild?’
‘Sure.’
He mentioned the name of a former US senator from the state of New York and asked if I was familiar with him.
‘Sure.’
‘Well, he’s gonna get indicted. It’ll happen in a few days.’
‘Really?’
He then dropped the name of a well-known Mafia celebrity who was in jail at the time and said he was ‘giving up’ the former senator in a deal to get out of the joint.
‘What did he do?’ I asked, meaning the former senator.
‘He’s been working for us for years.’
I paused for a moment while I processed this information. Here’s a guy getting a blowjob telling me he’s in the Mob and has inside information that a former US senator from New York is connected to the Mafia. Uh… okaaay…
‘No kidding,’ I said, ‘that is wild.’
‘Yeah, you’ll read about it in a few days.’
‘Wow.’
I buzzed down 9
Avenue and made a right on 43
. We hit a red light at 10
Avenue. There had been a lull of about thirty seconds in our conversation but now that we were sitting still Mr Horny Mob Guy felt it was time to start chatting again.
‘You play the horses?’ he asked.
‘Once in a while.’
‘Write this down – Wilfredo Prieto.’ (Not the name he actually said.)
‘Who’s Wilfredo Prieto?’
‘A jockey. ’Bout a week before Christmas he’s gonna ride a horse at Belmont. Fifty to one, but he’s gonna win.’
‘No kidding?’ I wrote the name down on my trip sheet.
‘Yeah, he comes up from Puerto Rico every year and does this race for us, then we give the money to charity.’
‘Hey, thanks, man,’ I said, ‘I’m gonna use this.’
‘Merry Christmas.’
‘Thanks!’
I drove up 10
Avenue and made a right on 52
. By the time we reached the end of the block the ride and the blowjob were over. He paid me $10 for a $6.10 fare and then he and the girl left the cab and disappeared in separate directions into the night.
Well, I was set. This fare, obviously a gift from the Supreme Being, was going to turn into my Christmas bonus. I started figuring out how much money I would be able to scrape together and even borrow and with a firm decision not to chicken out on this I began my hunt for Wilfredo Prieto. For the next three weeks I searched relentlessly through the sports sections of the papers for any sign of a race with a jockey with his name in it, but Christmas came and went with no mention of the guy.
And it may come as no surprise to you that no former senator from the state of New York has ever been indicted for anything.
So as it turned out I didn’t make a dime from the Mobbed-up, BJ conversationalist. It did, however, leave me with an important Life Lesson: never believe a damned word that is said to you by someone who is getting a blowjob.
For old times’ sake
It is lust that keeps the species reproducing itself. But it is love, respect and honesty that keep people staying together as partners throughout a lifetime. So it’s nice when you meet a couple who still enjoy each other’s company after dozens of years. It rehabilitates the idea that we, too, if we’re lucky (or skillful) enough may also have it so good. With that in mind, here’s a different kind of story about sex in a taxicab.
I picked up a man and a woman at a hotel near LaGuardia Airport on a lovely summer evening in 1987. They were seniors, near seventy years of age I guessed, and were en route to the Sloan– Kettering Hospital in Manhattan. Through the course of conversation I learned that their names were John and Barbara, that they were now retired – he had been a banker and she had been a teacher – and that the reason for their trip to the city was to begin cancer therapy for John.
They hadn’t been to New York in forty years, they said, not since they’d moved to California after World War II. But they had once lived and worked in the city and, in fact, they’d met each other here when they were both employed by the same company in an office near Herald Square. They wondered if it would be all right with me if, before we got to the hospital, we could take a brief tour around Manhattan for old times’ sake to see some of the sights which had been a part of their lives so many years ago.
Would it be all right with me? Were they kidding? Anything that keeps the meter running is just fine with me, and the truth is I always enjoy serving as a tour guide. It gives some contrast to the usual A to B fares and provides me a chance to show off my knowledge of the city, as well. I got on the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway and headed toward the Midtown Tunnel. Fifteen minutes later we were on 34
Street in Manhattan, heading west toward Herald Square.
The Empire State Building is on the corner of 34
Street and 5
Avenue, so I pointed it out as we approached it, thinking that surely this would be a sight they would want to see. But John and Barbara had little interest in the majestic skyscraper. What they were really interested in seeing in Herald Square was the Chock Full O’ Nuts coffee shop at the corner of 34
and 6
. It was there, they said, that they’d spent so many lunch hours gazing into each other’s eyes over chicken salad sandwiches.
As we got to the intersection both John and Barbara were straining their necks trying to get a glimpse of the place. But the Chock Full O’ Nuts coffee shop was gone. It had been replaced by a Gap clothing store.
It was obvious to me this was a major disappointment for them. That coffee shop had been an important landmark of their life together, and now it was just a memory. We continued driving west on 34
Street in a gloomy silence, but after about a minute John spoke up.
‘I know what,’ he said to both Barbara and me, ‘let’s go over to 31
and Broadway. If it’s still around, there’s another restaurant over there that’s pretty special to us.’
Barbara smiled, as apparently she knew what John was talking about. I made a right on 8
Avenue and another right on 36
Street, and we were on our way. A cheerfulness returned to the cab.
‘There’s a Horn and Hardart over there on Broadway,’ John said. ‘That’s where I proposed to this lovely, young lady.’
I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the Horn and Hardarts were long gone. When we got to 31
Street we found a parking lot where the automat had once been.
The gloom returned. I drove down Broadway until we were approaching 25
Street, and then Barbara had an idea.
‘What about Schrafft’s?’ she asked. ‘There used to be one on Madison Avenue. We ate dinner there a million times.’
I told them I wasn’t sure if any Schrafft’s were still around, but it did seem to ring a bell in my mind that there had been one on Madison. It was worth a try, so I drove to 23
Street, where Madison Avenue begins, and we headed uptown.
The traffic on the avenue was a mess, which actually was fortunate because it gave us a chance to examine every store and restaurant on each block as we crawled along. There was a sense of anxiety in the taxi as each new block failed to reveal a Schrafft’s and, by the time we were in the forties, the anxiety was taking on the feeling of despair. When we finally reached 60
Street, and still no Schrafft’s, the search was over.
‘Could you just drive us over to the hospital, then?’ John asked with a tone of resignation in his voice. I made a right on 68
Street and headed east toward Sloan-Kettering. I noticed in the mirror that Barbara was dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. We drove a couple of blocks. Then suddenly John’s voice returned with a new vitality.
‘What about the Plaza?’ he asked. ‘That’s still there, isn’t it?’
‘Sure,’ I replied.
‘Well, let’s go!’
Instantly their spirits lifted. The Plaza Hotel was only a few blocks away. I made a couple of turns and in less than two minutes we were parked right in front of the beautiful, old landmark. Both John and Barbara seemed mesmerized by the sight of it, almost in a state of awe. I noticed that Barbara’s eyes were tearing again, but this time she made no attempt to dry them. John appeared to be getting a bit misty, too.
‘We spent our wedding night here,’ Barbara said softly, the tears flowing freely down her cheeks.
We just sat there for a couple of minutes in front of the Plaza and then John had another idea. ‘Do you think you could take us for a ride through Central Park?’ he asked me.
‘Well, I could,’ I said, ‘if it’s still open. They close the park to cars at seven o’clock.’ It was nearly seven already, so I drove as quickly as I could to the entrance at 6
Avenue, and we were in luck – it was still open.
‘Tell you what,’ John said as he handed me some money, ‘here’s ten bucks. That’s your tip above whatever the meter says when we get to the hospital. But the deal is, while we’re in the park here, keep your eyes off of that damned mirror!’
Barbara scolded him, but I had taken no offense.
‘It’s a deal,’ I replied. Some of the great events of history have been created by just such conspiracies.
We headed north on Park Drive, the road that runs the two and a half mile length of Central Park. The ride, with its scenes filled with trees, flowers, and people in each other’s arms, took about twelve minutes. I must admit that I cheated two or three times and looked in the mirror to see what could be going on between two septuagenarians.
What was going on was plenty! They were wrapped around each other like a couple of vines and I would rank them right up there near the top of my all-time list of back seat kissing fools.
As we were approaching the exit of the park at Central Park South they straightened themselves up into normal sitting positions.
‘I’m sorry,’ Barbara said a little awkwardly, ‘for using your taxi for a purpose other than the one for which it was intended.’
‘Hey, that’s all right,’ I replied, ‘cabs are for kissing.’
It was one of those brilliant utterances which come tumbling out of your mouth every once in a while, almost of their own volition, which are just the right thing to say for the moment. Any lingering feeling of embarrassment dissipated into the evening air and, as we came out of the park, there was a noticeable serenity in the taxi. I made a left on Central Park South and headed for the East Side. It took about five more minutes to get them to the hospital and, as we said goodbye, I sensed a kind of bonding with Barbara and John that I think was mutual.
I felt that I would see them again one day.
2 Big City Crime (#u1e929d66-f408-5772-8f39-81c37a8f0f63)
Well, I hope you’re happy. You wanted sleazy stories about sex in taxicabs and now you’ve gotten them – plus a nice, sentimental one I’ll bet you weren’t expecting. So now let’s get down to business and move along to another much-requested type of story: crime.
‘Have you ever been held up?’ is a question I am often asked by passengers. After all, driving a taxi in New York City is a job that’s more dangerous than being a cop and unfortunately we do often hear stories about taxi drivers who are victims of crimes. My answer to that question, which is, happily, ‘No’, seems to do little to cancel out the lingering suspicion in the minds of some that New York is an unsafe place. But this sense of unease is not really based on actuality. Statistically speaking, New York is one of the safest cities in the United States. What’s bothering these people, I believe, is the perception of the possibility of crime. With so many iffy-looking people walking around, so many dark, deserted streets, and a media that heightens our fears with an insatiable appetite for crime, crime, CRIME!, we may lose sight of the fact that, generally speaking, people are getting along quite well with one another. But not always…
Swallowed
I was cruising along on West 75
Street on a pleasant evening in October, 1984 when I spotted a young man emerging from a brownstone, waving his hands frantically in the air, and calling out for me to stop.
‘Please wait here a minute,’ he pleaded as he came running up to the side of my cab, ‘I’ve got to help my friend get down the stairs.’ And then he ran back up the steps to the brownstone and opened the door there.
When I saw his friend my jaw dropped. He was also a young guy, medium in build, but he was completely covered in blood, his white t-shirt a red rag. As the two of them carefully navigated the steps and approached my cab, I could see that his face had been severely beaten, with his mouth, nose, and maybe even his eyes bleeding. He was indeed a horrifying sight.
‘Please get us to Roosevelt Hospital as fast as you can,’ the first one begged as the two of them slumped into the back seat. I tore out of there like the ambulance driver I had become and headed for the hospital, a sixteen-block journey. Of course, I wanted to know what had happened, and it was the explanation of the event, even more than the blood, which made a lasting impression on me.
What had happened was this: the guy had been walking on the sidewalk on the park side of Central Park West just as the sun was setting. There is a four-foot-high stone wall there that runs the length of Central Park, separating it from the sidewalk. As the soon-to-be-victim walked along, he passed another, somewhat larger, man who was leaning against a parked car. Suddenly this larger man grabbed him from behind and shoved him up against the stone wall. Behind the wall – actually inside the park – was another man who grasped the guy and pulled him up over the wall, into the park. The first thug then scaled the wall himself and proceeded, with his partner, to beat their prey to a pulp, as well as robbing him of his money and watch.
This incident became, in my mind, a metaphor for the condition New York City was in during those years. It was as if the young man in my cab had been swallowed by a monster – the city itself.
But by the time the nineties came around, the crime situation in New York started to show a noticeable improvement. Not only were the crime statistics down, the city actually began to look safer. Local politicians stood in line trying to take credit for the improvement, ignoring the fact that it was part of a national trend. But as someone who has been down in the trenches for a long, long time and as someone who might be considered to be sort of a professional observer, I formed my own opinion. Not to take anything away from police work that is sensible and on-target, nevertheless I attribute the drop in crime to three broader social factors.
1. AIDS – the devastation of the AIDS epidemic in New York City in the eighties and nineties should not be forgotten. I remember once having a passenger in my cab in 1989 who told me that he personally knew thirty-six people who had died of AIDS. The two principal groups affected were gays and intravenous drug users (‘junkies’). Well, guess what? The guy who broke the window of your car so he could steal the baby seat and whatever was in the glove compartment was a junkie. It may not be politically correct to say so, but if an epidemic is wiping out the junkies, the crime rate sure as hell is going to go down.
2. The cell phone – that’s right, the cell phone. By the time the millennium passed, nearly everyone in New York City owned one. Today, if a person sees a crime being committed, he can immediately alert the police. I once had a passenger tell me that her nephew had been held up by a young thug who pulled a knife on him while he was walking down a street in Manhattan. As the mugger jogged off, the nephew followed him from a distance while calling the police on his cell. The cops showed up instantly and the thief, seeing them, tried to escape by running into a subway station where he made the mistake of attempting to sprint across the tracks to the other side. He managed to avoid the third rail but did not manage to avoid an oncoming train which struck and killed him. Not that the guy deserved to die, of course, but the truth is his demise did bring the crime rate down.
3. Now here’s the big one, and it is surprising to me that I’ve never heard this mentioned as a reason for the drop in the crime rate nationally: race relations are improving. It seems to be human nature to become annoyed or outraged when things are going wrong, but to take no particular notice of it when things are going right. I believe the efforts of many, many well-intentioned people going back to the 1950s are bearing fruit – race relations are improving.
A kid growing up in the inner city today is not as likely to feel that, since he’s not allowed to be a part of the mainstream of society, it’s okay to commit crimes against it. He’s more likely to feel that he has a part in the game, too. Due to a gradual leveling of the playing field in economic and educational opportunities, the boundary lines between the ghetto and the rest of the city are disappearing. It’s no longer unusual for me to take a white guy to his apartment house in Harlem or to drop a black, urban professional off at his building in the Financial District.
But you’re not going to see any politician get up and say, ‘Well, the reason the crime rate is down isn’t really because of anything I am doing – it’s being caused by trends in the society that I have no control over.’ To the contrary.
In the late nineties Mayor Giuliani, riding on a crest of popularity as a crime-stopper in his first administration, decided to take it a step further in his second and final four years in office. Seizing upon a dubious philosophy that if you can stop the little crimes you will also somehow be nipping the big crimes in the bud, he set an army of police officers out to seek and destroy sin at even its smallest incarnation.
Hounded
A woman of perhaps seventy years entered my cab one evening in September, 1998 whose destination was her apartment building on 96
Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. In her arms she held a cute little Cocker Spaniel whose name, I learned, was Terrence. It took only a few words of admiration from me about her pet to set her off on a tirade. This woman was a firecracker ready to explode.
She told me she had started the day, as she always did, by taking her dog for an early-morning walk in Central Park. Not too far from where she enters the park, she said, there’s a wide-open field where she lets Terrence off the leash for a few minutes to get some exercise before they head back to the apartment house. That day had been no different – she had let little Terrence off the leash.
But this is technically against the law and the violation was spotted by a cop in a patrol car who swooped down on her, she said, like a hawk zeroing in on a mouse. The cop informed her of the infraction and told her he would have to write her a summons for a hundred dollars.
Identification, please.
She didn’t have any.
At this point the policeman could have taken her off to the police station if he’d wanted to, but, she said bitterly, instead he opted to do her a ‘favor’ by hauling her and Terrence in the cruiser to her own building. After they rode up in the elevator to the 6
floor, she showed him the necessary papers, he wrote her out the ticket, and he departed, leaving behind one pissed-off septuagenarian.
One has to wonder what ‘bigger crimes’ are prevented by cracking down on old ladies who let their dogs off the leash. But one does not have to wonder why, after a few years of this, Mayor Giuliani’s popularity plummeted like a stone and he began to be known as ‘Mayor Crueliani’ in my taxicab.
Upon reflection, I found that I had acquired a new metaphor. This incident symbolized for me what New York City had become – not quite a police state (thank you, the Constitution of the United States), but a too-heavily-policed state. The trauma of being victimized by a thug had been replaced to some degree by the trauma of being victimized by agents of the municipality itself.
But that is not to say that the city has become a place where crime is at such a minimum that you no longer need to have ‘street smarts’. You do. And the most important street smart in a city of strangers is simply good manners.
The wrong guy
I had someone in my cab on a Saturday night in March, 1999 whom you know. Or at least know of. You have never seen his face, but you have wondered what he looked like. And you have spoken of him from time to time.
Let me explain. Has something like this ever happened to you? You are walking along on a crowded city sidewalk and you’re in a pretty good mood, just minding your own business, when someone walking in the opposite direction bumps into you so hard that it knocks you off balance for a moment. You look at the person who did this and expect to hear some kind of an apology, but instead you hear this: ‘Watch where you’re going, asshole.’
Or this? You are waiting in line at the Quikcheck and someone a foot taller than you blatantly cuts right in front of you with his beer just as you were about to step up to the cashier. You think of saying something to the guy but he looks like a thug, so you just keep your mouth shut and stand there with your half-gallon of milk.
In both cases your urge to react in a forceful way is suppressed by the consideration of what the consequences might be if you did. You might be injured. Hell, you might be killed. You might be arrested and charged with assault. You might have a lawsuit on your hands. So you just stand there and take it. But you soothe your anger by thinking this thought: ‘Someday that guy is gonna meet the wrong guy.’
But the wrong guy is not you, so the moment of retribution has not arrived. Nevertheless, you know he’s out there somewhere and it’s just a matter of time before he evens the score with this subhuman who was just so rude to you.
It was the ‘wrong guy’ who got into my cab that night in March, 1999. I had taken a fare out to Jackson Heights in Queens at midnight and was heading back toward Manhattan on Northern Boulevard when I was hailed by a man who came suddenly running out to the street. I stopped the cab, he got in, and we drove off.
He was a stocky, Hispanic-looking man, maybe five foot six or seven, and he was in a state of extreme agitation. Without any prior conversation, these alarming words came out of his mouth: ‘FUCKING BASTARD! DAMN FUCKING BASTARD!’
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked (of course).
His answer startled me again. Not only because of what he said, but the way that he said it. He actually started to cry.
‘Oh my God,’ he sobbed in a lowered voice, ‘I hope I didn’t kill him.’
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘THAT STUPID FUCKING BASTARD!’ he screamed. ‘WHO THE FUCK DOES HE THINK HE’S TALKING TO? I WAS IN ’NAM, I DON’T HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THIS SHIT!’
‘What happened?’
And then he began crying again.
‘I think I killed him,’ he sobbed as he covered his face in his hands. ‘Oh God, I hope I didn’t kill him.’
To say that this guy was upset would be more than an understatement. He was riding on a wave of emotion that went up to anger and down to grief like a yo-yo, back and forth, and was literally inconsolable. It took the full ten minutes of the two-mile trip to Astoria for me to piece together what had happened.
He had been sitting in a bar, alone, just minding his own business, having a couple of drinks, and brooding to himself about his own troubles. Three rowdy young men entered the bar and sat nearby. One of these guys decided it would be a good time to have some ‘fun’ at my passenger’s expense. He began making belittling comments to him while his buddies laughed. He wouldn’t let up and it led to a brawl.
The fight was no shoving match. It became an outright slugfest which ended with the other guy collapsing on the floor from a chop to the neck which may have crushed his windpipe. He gasped desperately for breath before finally slumping over, unconscious, and possibly suffocating. My passenger ran out of the bar to the street and jumped into my cab which happened to be approaching on Northern Boulevard.
What the moron in the bar didn’t know when he decided to forget his manners was that he had finally met ‘the wrong guy’. His object of ridicule was an ex-marine who knew martial arts and was in no mood to take crap from some punk.
When we arrived at his place, I gave him this advice: talk to no one else about this incident other than a priest. Don’t let your feelings of guilt put you in a jail cell. The guy muttered something that might have been a thank you, got out of my cab, and disappeared into the night.
I found it a bit odd in myself that, although my passenger had just committed a serious crime in the eyes of the law, I felt sympathy for him and was actually rooting for him not to get caught. This was partially because I had seen how remorseful he was and I did not deem him to be an evil person. But it was also because the person he may have killed represented to me an aspect of humanity that is begging for correction – the psycho who takes pleasure in intimidating strangers. This person, in my mind, is more of a danger to society than the guy with a short fuse who strikes him down.
Of course, New York, the city which prides itself on its variety, also has great variety in its types of criminals. There’s the overt bully mentioned above; marauders who commit impulsive crimes like grabbing pocketbooks and running away; husbands who commit adultery; wives who put nail polish in their cheating husband’s soup; and even the occasional sociopath who doesn’t clean up after his dog (although this is rare, indeed).
But the one type of criminal we seem to be endlessly fascinated by, the one we can’t get enough of, is, of course, the professional. Grouped together, they are the subjects of countless movies and TV shows.
You know who I mean…
They were hit men
These people don’t go around telling you who they are. You have to figure it out for yourself. One Friday afternoon in February, 1985 I had two of them in my cab taking a trip to Newark Airport.
They didn’t tell me who they were.
I figured it out for myself.
I’d been cruising lower Manhattan in the late afternoon when they hailed me from the street. One of them was tall and thin, the other shorter and a bit on the chubby side. They told me immediately that they had to go to Newark Airport in New Jersey; that they wanted me to take the Holland Tunnel; that they were getting a 5.30 p.m. flight to Chicago; and that they did this trip every week on Fridays. I didn’t realize it at the time, but these bits of information were to become pieces of the puzzle needed to understand exactly who they were and what they did for a living.
I was glad to get a fare to Newark Airport – it was about a $25 run at the time – but I was concerned about the traffic. From where we were in lower Manhattan I would indeed have to take the Holland Tunnel and the rush hour congestion in the tube can be a nightmare, both leaving and returning to the city, and especially on a Friday. So I turned the radio on to the news station so I could learn as much as possible about road conditions in the area.
My passengers were engaged in continuous conversation, going back and forth from English to Italian. I found there was something about them which stuck my attention on them and aroused my curiosity. It wasn’t just the Italian – it was a certain demeanor they had. When you do a job continuously over a long period of time, the types of particles you deal with fall into familiar categories. These two guys didn’t quite fit. There was something about them.
I found myself wondering if maybe they were Mafia and I immediately scolded myself for even thinking that. I’m not the kind of person who goes around making bigoted assumptions. Still, I just couldn’t get the thought out of my mind that they seemed like they could be Mob. It was not a thought I would normally have had.
Of the two of them, the one who really grabbed my attention as I glanced at them in the mirror was the taller, thinner one. He appeared to be in his late forties and had slick, black hair that was combed straight back. His face was noticeably pale and tight. This was a man who could have been cast as Dracula if he’d been an actor – he had a vampire kind of look. His companion was much younger, a bit heavy-set, with sleepy-looking eyes, brown hair and a protruding lower lip.
I engaged them with some small talk about the traffic. The younger one had some feeling in his voice, I noticed, but the older one had a voice and a manner in the way he spoke which I found disturbing. There was a hollowness and a solidity about him that wasn’t quite like anyone I had encountered before. I couldn’t seem to get free from an intuitive feeling that this guy was the real thing.
We approached the Holland Tunnel in traffic that really wasn’t as bad as I’d expected and, as we entered the tube, the sound waves of the cab’s radio went temporarily dead, not returning again until we were nearly at the end of the tunnel on the Jersey side. Then, as the radio kicked in, a story started to come on about a criminal trial which was taking place in Manhattan at the time and had been receiving quite a bit of publicity. It was called the ‘pizza connection’ trial because pizzerias were said to be laundering drug money. About twenty Mafiosi were being tried together as a group on various charges. As the broadcast began, the older one heard what it was about and jolted forward in his seat.
‘Turn that up, please!’ he blurted out in his heavily accented voice.
I turned the volume up. The latest details about the trial, which had been going on for several weeks, were given. For the twenty seconds or so that the story was being broadcast, my passengers both listened intently to every word. Then, when the piece was over, they sat back in their seats and began talking to each other with great animation in Italian.
As I turned the volume back down, there was something akin to a lump in my throat. I had suddenly realized exactly where it had been that I had picked them up – it was in Foley Square, the very place where all the courthouses were located. And they’d gotten in my cab at four o’clock, the time of day when a trial would be recessing. And they had told me that they make this trip to Chicago every Friday. They were going back home for the weekend until the trial picked up again the following Monday!
I knew at this moment as well as I could ever know that these guys sitting five feet behind me were card-carrying members of the Mob. Not Mob wannabees like the blowjob conversationalist whom we’ve already met – they were the real thing and were either on trial themselves or associated with others who were.
It took me a minute or two to digest this reality and still keep my eyes on the road. After a couple of minutes I began to wonder where in the Mafia echelon these two might fit. Were they big shots or thugs?
I ran that through my mind. I’d glance at them in my mirror and try to visualize them either as bosses or underlings. Did they give orders or take orders? I concluded that they must be low in the scheme of things simply because they were taking a cab to the airport instead of a private car. A big wheel would have some kind of a limo. But aside from that, how did they seem?
I looked at the younger guy. He wore an ordinary-looking leather jacket. He appeared to be a bit dull, actually. Definitely not a boss of any kind. I could envision him, however, as a muscle boy without conscience, perhaps hijacking a truck on I-95. He looked like he could play that part, but that was about it. He didn’t have a perceptible sinister demeanor about him but nevertheless he was somebody who could inflict real brutality at the behest of others.
But it was the older guy, once again, who stopped me in my mental tracks. I tried to imagine where he was in the Mob. Possibly a middle-level boss of some kind, but without flamboyance or spark. I didn’t find it difficult to picture him, however, knocking on a door which is opened by someone he’s never met before, calmly pulling out a gun, firing it into the stranger’s head, and then going home and enjoying a hot bowl of linguini.
The more I looked at him in the mirror, the more I became convinced that this was the guy. Yes, this was the guy! It was his manner, the way he carried himself, the way he looked when he talked to the other guy, the deadness in his voice, the shark-like quality in his eyes.
It is my understanding in life that people who decide to do evil things must first justify to themselves why it is okay to do what they do. What they’re not aware of is that along with this justification comes an attitude. This guy had the attitude, just a nuance thing, of someone who had long ago justified to himself why it was okay to murder other people. It was this which was sticking my attention on him! I had never consciously observed it in another person before, but the longer he was in my space, the more certain I was becoming of it. I was driving a professional killer to the airport.
So how do you drive when you know that the fellow sitting just behind you puts bullets through people’s brains for a living? Carefully! Two hands on the wheel, steady as she goes, and lots of space between the taxi and the other cars on the road! I figured the only danger I could be in from these guys would be if I had an accident while they were in my cab. We crash into another car, one of them ruptures a disc, and then a few months later, there’s a knock on my door…
Fortunately we arrived at Newark Airport without a problem, a smooth ride that left them plenty of time to make their flight. As we approached the terminal it occurred to me that there might be one other little way of determining their status in the Mafia – the tip. A boss at any level would surely be a big tipper, right? But a triggerman monster would be someone who knows in his core that everyone is his enemy and no one really exists except himself, anyway. And this lack of empathy would show itself in the tip.
We came to the end of the ride. The fare was $26.90. The younger guy got out of the cab and the older one remained seated while he reached into a pocket to find his money. As he handed me some bills, he reached forward and put his hand on my shoulder (this cab had no partition). And then, while keeping his hand right there – the hand of Death upon my shoulder! – he said these words, slowly and strongly accented:
‘I’m sorry, my friend, but I have not much money today.’
He had handed me a twenty, a five and two singles – $27. A ten-cent tip!
It was an insult to my dignity as a working man. Hit man or no hit man, I felt I had to say something. I could feel I needed all my inner strength to say to him what I wanted to say, so I reached down deep to come up with the right words. And then I spoke those words with a smile on my face and without the slightest indication of insincerity in the tone of my voice:
‘Hey, that’s all right, sir, have a good flight!’
He closed the door and walked off toward the terminal. I pulled out from the curb and drove away in the opposite direction. Quickly!
Ah, the Mob. I’ve wondered from time to time what exactly the charm is about these guys. Why do we usually see them not so much as criminals but more as a form of entertainment? The answer, of course, is that we view them in the abstract. It’s not really us that they threaten. They’re either killing each other or some fool who was stupid enough to cross them.
One’s attitude toward a criminal, however, can change rather abruptly when the victim is yourself. This was something I discovered first-hand on Christmas Eve in 1987…
The cab driver who does not speak English
As mentioned before, it’s quite common in my case to have someone get in my cab and suddenly express amazement that I’m an American. Or, if they don’t actually say ‘American’, they often say something like, ‘Wow, it’s really nice to have an English-speaking cab driver for a change.’ Immediately following this comment I will be told a story about how my passenger was recently in a cab with some driver who spoke absolutely no English and had to use hand signals to make this driver understand where he wanted to go. I’ve heard this story so many times that it began to give me the impression that there must be a small army of cabbies out there who speak virtually no English.
And yet I had never met one.
It struck me as odd that with all these reports about cab drivers who don’t speak English, I, who meet cab drivers all the time on the street, in garages, in front of hotels and at the airports, had never once found myself in a situation in which I could not communicate with a cabbie. Sure, there were lots of guys whose English was accented because their native language was Hindi, Arabic, Russian or whatever, but never did I have to resort to sign language to make myself understood, nor did I ever really have a problem communicating with words. So what was going on here? Why do I keep hearing about cab drivers who don’t speak English?
I had to become a crime victim myself to find out the answer.
On Christmas Eve, 1987, I was mugged. I had been at a party at a friend’s apartment on 9
Avenue between 44
and 45
Streets with my wife and young daughter. The party went on late and it was after three o’clock in the morning when we were finally ready to leave. My daughter had long since fallen asleep so I decided to walk to 10
Avenue, where I’d parked my car, and then bring it around to 9
Avenue to pick up my family.
I made a mistake that I, as a veteran New Yorker and a cab driver, should never have made: I attempted to walk down a deserted street (45
), in a not-so-great part of town (Hell’s Kitchen), late at night, carrying something that showed some value (two wrapped Christmas presents). When I was halfway to 10
Avenue, I was attacked by three thugs.
The whole thing took less than fifteen seconds: I heard running footsteps coming toward me from behind, I was shoved into a doorway, and I had a knife held against my throat by one man while the other two grabbed the Christmas presents and went through my pockets for my money (about a hundred dollars). Having gotten what they wanted, they then started to run down 45
Street, back toward 9
Avenue.
They say you follow your instincts in these situations, and my instinct was to let them get a bit of a lead and then run after them in the hope of finding a cop who could catch them and arrest them. I didn’t want to get too close to them – they had a knife – but I wanted to keep them in sight. So I started running after them in pursuit.
When the muggers got to 9
Avenue they ran to the right and then were momentarily out of my range of vision. Then, as I got to the avenue myself, I saw them approaching 44
Street and run east on that street before disappearing once again from my view.
I stopped for a second and looked around, hoping to find a cop, but there were none around. I then realized that I was bleeding from the neck and that my shirt was covered with blood. Oddly, I wasn’t terribly concerned about that at that moment. All I wanted to do was to catch these bastards. And they were getting away.
Suddenly I had a brilliant idea. I would hail a cab and then follow the thieves in the cab until we found a police car. I ran out onto 9
Avenue. Yes! – there was an available cab heading right toward me! My luck had turned. I threw both hands up excitedly to hail the cab and it pulled up next to me. I jumped in the back seat. This cab had no partition, more good luck because I’d be able to see the muggers more easily.
The driver was a young guy who looked like he might be Moroccan. He turned around to look at me so he could get my destination. I was obviously in a state of great agitation, but I calmed myself down enough so I could communicate.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I was just mugged. The guys who mugged me are running down 44
Street. I want to follow them ’til we can find a cop!’
My driver did not react. He just looked at me.
‘Go left on 44
! Please! Go! Drive! They’re getting away!’
He continued to stare at me blankly. Then he started to speak. Out of his mouth came these words, and this is an exact quote:
‘Obbie de bobbie de bah.’
I was completely desperate.
‘Listen,’ I begged the guy, ‘I’m a cab driver myself and I just got mugged! Please! Go left on 44
Street! Go! Go! I’m a cab driver!’
‘Obbie de bobbie de bah?’ he asked.
I tried pantomime. I pretended I was holding a steering wheel in my hands and then pointed toward 44
Street.
‘Obbie de bobbie de bah?’
Defeated, I got out of the cab in disgust, slammed the door, and walked back to my friend’s apartment to tend to my wound. Although the cut in my neck had produced quite a bit of blood, it fortunately wasn’t very serious and a visit to a hospital wasn’t necessary.
The muggers were never caught.
I spent the following week ranting and raving to anyone who’d listen about cab drivers in New York who don’t speak English. What’s the matter with this city, I wailed, that they’ll let anyone whose breath can fog a mirror push a hack here? Why should we have to pay good money to morons who think Madison Square Garden is some place where they grow tulips? Why, why, oh WHY does the Taxi and Limousine Commission allow these hordes of immigrants who can’t speak a damned syllable of English to clog our streets with this morass of yellow clunkers?
And then I had a brilliant realization. I knew what it was! It wasn’t that there were dozens or hundreds or thousands of cab drivers who don’t speak English – it was this one guy!Everyone who’s ever been in his cab is driven so crazy by this one guy that they start to generalize like mad and tell everyone they meet that there are no English-speaking cabbies anymore in New York City.But it’s really just this one guy!Too bad I had to become a statistic myself to acquire such a profound insight.
It’s just this one guy, I tell you!
3 Changes (#u1e929d66-f408-5772-8f39-81c37a8f0f63)
I was driving a friendly, female Gonnabee to Williamsburg in Brooklyn one night in 2005 when she asked me that famous question: ‘How long have you been driving a cab?’
‘How old are you?’ I replied.
‘Twenty-five.’
‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘I’ve been driving a cab since you were eighty-six in your last lifetime.’ Which is my way of saying, ‘Since before you were born, honey.’
Big smile and wide eyes.
‘Wow,’ she marveled, ‘you must have seen so many changes!’
Well, the answer to that is kind of both yes and no. Certainly some things have changed. You don’t dare light up a cigarette in a public place anymore, not even in a bar, or you will be immediately arrested by the cigarette police. The hookers have been driven off the streets (almost). And there aren’t nearly as many New York ‘characters’ begging for our attention on the sidewalks as there used to be. (Like the ‘Opera Man’ who could often be found screeching out arias on the corner of 57
and Broadway.)
But for the most part I think things have stayed more the same than they’ve changed. The buildings are tall, the streets are crowded, and people are in a big rush. Donald Trump is rich and has a beautiful wife. And whoever was elected mayor has turned out to be an idiot.
The truth is I don’t really know any more about what has changed or not changed in New York City than anyone else. Except for one thing – the taxi business. This is the one sector of life in which I proclaim myself to be the grand master, an all-knowing sage whose opinions must be given the utmost respect. So if you want to know what’s changed in the taxi business, hey, listen up and take notes. There will be an exam the next time you’re in my cab.
By around 1995 I became aware of an ominous trend which had seeped into the trade. People started to get into my cab, plop themselves comfortably in the back seat, and tell me they wanted to go to some destination in Brooklyn on the expectation that I would actually be willing to take them there.
This represented a significant change in the taxi industry. More specifically, it marked a change in the attitudes of drivers. Since time began, taxi drivers in New York City had been known for being crusty, hard-nosed men, often short on manners, fearless of authority, and willing to drive you to your destination only on the condition that they were in the mood to do so.
A ride to Brooklyn or one of the other outer boroughs at most times of the day is considered undesirable because it almost always means the driver will be coming back to Manhattan without a passenger – and that is dead time. So the driver sees such a fare not as money made, but as money lost. Thus he refuses the ride, even though he may be fined if the snubbed passenger makes an issue of it with the Taxi and Limousine Commission.
So prevalent were refusals to Brooklyn that the mantra of the New York City taxi driver had become – and this was a citywide joke – ‘I don’t go to Brooklyn.’ An old friend of mine who drove a cab in the ’70s, Dennis Charnoff, used to claim that he never had taken a fare out of Manhattan. Not to Brooklyn, not to Queens, not to the Bronx, not even to the airports. Never.
In the spirit of the great talk show host Johnny Carson, who once joked that he planned to have the words ‘Johnny will not be back after these messages’ written on his tombstone, I myself have considered having the following epitaph written on my own grave:
Eugene Salomon
1949 – (a really, really long time from now)
TAXI DRIVER
‘I DON’T GO TO BROOKLYN’
(Just don’t bury me in Brooklyn. It would kill the whole joke.)
So what happened to the brassy driver with an attitude? What changed? The ethnicity of taxi drivers, that’s what changed. By around 1995, by my own estimation, something like seventy-five percent of cabbies were from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. They had taken the place of drivers from such countries as Greece, Israel, Russia, Taiwan and Romania. And, oh yes, America.
Why did this occur? Because the working conditions of the industry were allowed to fall so far below the standards of other available jobs in the United States by uncaring city officials that experienced drivers were leaving the business in droves.
In 1979 a change in the rules made all taxi drivers ‘independent contractors’. (Even though the city retained the right to tell us what we may charge for our services. How ‘independent’ is that?) ‘Independent contractor’ means ‘self-employed’. Thus, no benefits. No sick days, no overtime, no paid vacations, no health care, no pensions. Add onto that twelve hour shifts, a job that is dangerous, and no union to demand timely rate increases (yes, a workforce of forty thousand and no union) and you no longer have to wonder why you can’t remember the last time you had an American at the wheel of your cab. Or a Russian, Israeli or Greek, for that matter.
The void was filled by the Indians and Pakistanis. When immigration regulations allowed these workers to enter the country and get green cards, the bosses of the taxi business discovered they had finally found the perfect cab driver – someone whose present working conditions are so much better than what they were in the old country (a Pakistani driver once told me he made better money driving a cab in New York than he would if he were a medical doctor in Pakistan) that he actually puts great value on his job as a taxi driver and will do whatever he has to do to make sure he doesn’t lose it.
In short, taxi drivers have become compliant and timid. Gone is the guy named Lenny smoking a cigar who drops you off on Lexington instead of Park because ‘Park is out of my way’. Gone is the maniac who speeds past police cars and runs red lights. It makes me nostalgic, it does, for the good old days…
Jackie oh my God
On a beautiful summer day in 1981, unfortunately with a passenger already in the back seat of my cab, I stopped at a red light on Central Park South, right next to the Plaza Hotel. Suddenly appearing from out of nowhere, as if from a dream, and walking right toward me was a sight that stunned me completely and utterly.
It was Jackie Kennedy.
I’m not sure if my jaw literally dropped, but if someone told me it was down on the floorboard I would not have been completely surprised.
‘Oh my God,’ I blurted out to my passenger, ‘it’s Jackie Kennedy!’
‘Oh my God,’ she replied with equal amazement, ‘it is Jackie Kennedy!’
Yes, Jackie Kennedy, accompanied by another woman, was looking for a taxi and had sighted my taxi. Like most New Yorkers, I am relatively blasé about celebrities, but this was not just any celebrity. This was the ultimate celebrity. This was Jackie Kennedy. To say I was completely mesmerized would not have been an understatement.
Now you have to remember who Jackie Kennedy was. Throughout the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s it is safe to say she was second only to Queen Elizabeth as being the most famous woman in the world. You saw her image just about every day of your life in magazines, newspapers, books or on the tube. You heard about her on the radio. She was nearly as familiar to you as a member of your own family and it would have been impossible not to have recognized her instantly. And there she was, from the land of the surreal, suddenly walking directly toward me.
Certain moments in your life create such an impact that they remain frozen in time forever in your memory. You replay them over and over in your mind, noticing and renoticing every detail in the mental image. This was such a moment for me.
She wore a loose-fitting burgundy blouse with narrow, vertical, gold stripes and a black skirt cut at the knees. Her hair was the brown, shoulder-length style we were so used to seeing in photographs. In fact, although she was over fifty at the time, Jackie appeared remarkably to have aged not a day since she had been the First Lady of the United States. She looked exactly the same.
And she was gorgeous. Drop-dead gorgeous, as the expression goes. Stunningly, exceedingly beautiful. A woman everyone would look twice at, even if she weren’t already so overwhelmingly famous.
Jackie walked out onto the street in front of my cab and peered inside, trying to see if there was already a passenger in the back seat. If I could have pushed an ejection button and sent my passenger flying off into the stratosphere I would certainly have done so, and Jackie would have gotten in.
But it was not to be. She saw that my taxi was occupied and then spotted another cab, a Checker, without a passenger in it directly next to mine on my left. As she walked around the front of my cab and entered the narrow space between this other cab and my own, I realized that in a moment she would be right next to me and, because my window was already rolled down, I would be able to speak to her. I felt a distinct rush that must have been a release of adrenaline, and then, as the moment arrived with Jackie Kennedy standing beside me, I found that my mouth had opened and words had begun to dribble out of it.
‘Hello, Mrs Onassis,’ I said sheepishly.
Right away it didn’t sound right. Sure, her name was actually ‘Jackie Onassis’ because she’d married Aristotle Onassis, but it didn’t fit her. In my mind, and I think in everybody’s mind, she would always be ‘Jackie Kennedy’. I thought maybe I should have just said, ‘Hello, Jackie’, but, anyway, it was too late. The words had been said and she’d heard me and now she was putting her attention on me. I feared she might scowl at me or just ignore me entirely, but she didn’t – she smiled at me.
It was a warm smile that, interestingly, made me feel special, as if somehow we had known each other for a long time. It was a smile that communicated that she knew who she was and was quite aware of and caring about how her presence affected other people, and that she had mastered the elements of fame.
But more than that, it was a smile that brought back an era. Here was Camelot, not gone, but returning to life once again. Here was John F. Kennedy and the idealism of my generation. Here was the woman in the pink suit covered with the president’s blood, catapulted out of history, standing right next to me, undefeated, triumphant.
Jackie reached forward to open the door of the Checker cab on my left and as she did so I could see through the window that the driver of that cab was an old-time professional, an American, about fifty years old. Here was a guy who could easily be typecast in a commercial or a movie as ‘taxi driver’. He had an Archie Bunker kind of appearance.
Jackie Kennedy opened the rear door of his cab and started to get in, but before she could sit down, this driver turned around in his seat and looked right at her – he had something to say. With his face contorted into a snarl, and with a voice that was somewhere between a growl and an outright scream, out came these exact words:
‘I’M ONLY GOING UPTOWN!’
‘Oh my God,’ I said to my passenger, ‘I can’t believe he spoke to her that way!’
‘Oh my God,’ she echoed, ‘I can’t believe it, either!’
But Jackie batted not an eye. She was, in fact, going uptown and stepped into the guy’s cab with her companion, completely undisturbed by the driver’s incredible lack of manners.
So there he was, the taxi driver of old, himself a vestige of a bygone era. I believe I can safely say that if this guy wasn’t going to take Jackie Kennedy downtown, he wasn’t going to take you to Brooklyn. But not to worry, today a perfectly nice fellow named Ramesh will drive you to Brooklyn, or to the Bronx for that matter, without a word of protest.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what’s changed in the taxi business in New York City.
Along with one other thing – did someone say ‘Checker cab’?
How I brought about the demise of the Checker Motor Company
Now here’s something I can’t blame on the mayor. In fact, I hate to admit it, but it may have been my fault: the Checkers are gone. The beloved Checkers – these were the taxis you see in any movie set in New York City between 1956 and about 1990. Built like tanks, they had extended room in the back, flat floorboards with no uncomfortable ‘hump’ in the middle, and two folding ‘jump seats’ that enabled five adults (or twenty midgets) to sit back there. These vehicles have become nostalgia items for anyone who grew up or lived in New York during those years.
Most people don’t know that the Checkers were manufactured by the Checker Motor Company, which was not a subsidiary of General Motors or any other conglomerate, but was an independent company on its own. Located in Kalamazoo, Michigan, nearly all the cars that rolled off that assembly line were specifically built to be taxicabs. To make it easier for taxi fleets to replace broken parts and to keep costs down, they stopped redesigning the Checkers in 1956. So the Checkers lookedlike they were old cars even though they may have been relatively new.
But the Checker Motor Company had big problems. After the gasoline crisis in 1979, many taxi fleet owners switched to Chevrolets, Fords and Dodges. In the highly competitive world of automobile manufacturing, Checker was losing ground and by 1981 was barely treading water.
How was I to know that an innocent conversation between myself and a certain passenger would provide the coup de grâce for these fabulous cars? I’m asking you in advance to please not hate me. Okay, here’s the story…
In the second week of July, 1981, I was driving a Checker cab that was owned by my friend Itzy at a garage called West Side Ignition. At West Side Ignition they had a saying: ‘If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. And if it is broken, don’t fix it.’ So when I’d bring the car in for an oil change and mention to Itzy that the shocks were basically gone, Itzy would tell me that as long as the cab was in running condition, to hell with the shocks, just go out and drive. Apparently ‘running condition’ meant that your condition would be better if you were running instead of trying to drive the damned thing.
Anyway, I was driving this Checker when I was hailed by a middle-aged suburban Workerbee in a business suit who looked like any other commuter on his way home from work. He asked me to bring him to Penn Station, a fifteen-minute trip, and he settled back into his seat and opened up a newspaper. It looked to be an uneventful ride until, about two blocks from where we’d started, the cab ran over a particularly nasty pothole.
Now, the Checkers were strong cars and they had a reputation for being indestructible, but they didn’t exactly give you a smooth ride. When we hit the pothole, the cab kind of went KA-BOOM, and I found myself momentarily bouncing up and down on the front seat. In fact, the car had taken the pothole so badly that I felt a need to apologize to my passenger.
‘Sorry,’ I said with a laugh, ‘I guess they don’t make them like they used to.’ Not that they really made them any differently than they ever did. It was just something to say.
My passenger, who up to this point hadn’t said a word to me, suddenly came alive. He put down his newspaper, opened up his briefcase, and took out a notepad and a pen.
‘I’d like you to do something for me,’ he said. ‘I’d like you to tell me everything you don’t like about Checkers. I’ll write down what you say.’
Well, I thought this was fine. Someone wants to know what I think. I started in with a vengeance.
‘First of all, obviously they can’t take bumps worth a damn,’ I said. He wrote it down.
‘The gas mileage is awful. They only get eight or nine miles per gallon.’ He wrote that down.
‘Lousy acceleration.’
‘What else?’
‘Squeaky brakes.’
‘What else?’
Now I was really getting into it. ‘These dashboards are so old-fashioned. They slope straight down so you can’t put anything on top of them. You know, they stopped redesigning these cars in 1956.’
He wrote quickly to keep up with me, but if I spoke too fast he would hold me up until he could get it all down. It seemed to be a matter of some concern to him that he recorded every word I said.
‘What else?’
‘Well, the trunk doesn’t spring up when you push the button to open it. There’s no place to grip it.’
It was true. Whenever the trunk needed to be opened, the driver had to get out of the cab and pry it open with his fingertips. The privately owned Checkers all had customized handles – installed by the owners themselves, not the Checker Motor Company – on the trunks to overcome this problem.
‘Really,’ I groaned, ‘what kind of a car company makes a car – a taxi, no less – with a trunk that makes it a challenge to open it?’
‘Okay, what else?’
‘The goddamned battery is back there in the trunk where there’s no ventilation. When you start working at a new garage, they give you a big speech on your first day warning you not to hold a cigarette in your hand when you open the trunk because it might set off an explosion if the battery happens to be bad and is giving off fumes! You know, when batteries go bad they emit sulfuric acid, which is flammable. Whoever heard of a battery being in the trunk, anyway? Why don’t they put it under the hood like in all other cars?’
It went on like this until we arrived at Penn Station. I told him everything anyone could possibly imagine could be wrong with Checkers, and it felt wonderful.
‘So what is this,’ I asked, ‘some kind of taxi driver therapy?’
‘Hell, no,’ my passenger said, ‘the Chairman of the Board of the Checker Motor Company is an old childhood friend of mine and I’m having lunch with him in Kalamazoo next Wednesday. I’m going to tell him everything you told me.’ And with that he handed me the money for the ride along with a generous tip and disappeared into the crowd in Penn Station.
I sat there kind of dumbfounded for a minute in my beat-up cab. Gee, I thought, maybe someday this will result in better Checkers being made. Maybe the Chairman of the Board will be impressed with my astute observations and he’ll fix up all the things I said were wrong. Maybe something I said will really make a difference! I thought of all the people in America who would be riding around in better cars.
Well, it didn’t exactly work out that way. Three weeks later I heard on the radio that the Checker Motor Company was going out of business!And, indeed, in July, 1982 the last Checker came off the assembly line.
So here’s what must have happened: my passenger did, in fact, have lunch with his old childhood pal the next Wednesday in Kalamazoo. But unbeknownst to my passenger, his old friend was desperately trying to decide at that time whether or not to take out yet another massive loan to keep the company afloat. He tries to put his troubles out of his mind for an hour by having lunch with his childhood buddy whom he hasn’t seen in years. He wants to reminisce about the good old days.
But noooo, his old pal pulls out this goddamned list of goddamned complaints about his cars that was dictated to him by a real, goddamned New York City taxi driver – as if he doesn’t already know what’s wrong with his own cars. Later that night, after kicking the cat and screaming at the kids – or maybe kicking the kids and screaming at the cat – he decides screw it, it’s just not worth the frustration. He’s got enough to retire on anyway, so he’s going in tomorrow to tell the Board it’s all over.
And there went our beloved Checkers.
So you see, it really wasn’t my fault. If blame is to be placed, it should rest on the shoulders of that guy who was in my cab, not me. The trouble was he didn’t ask me what I liked about Checkers. If he did, I would have told him about the jump seats and the miles of room in the back. I would have told him about the flat floorboards and how, if you were driving a Checker, it would bring you extra business every night because there were always some passengers who would let other types of cabs go by when they saw you coming. In fact, I once missed getting Andy Warhol in my cab because the cab I was driving was not a Checker. Although no one was in my cab, a Chevrolet, he let me drive right past him so he could take the Checker that was behind me.
But, alas, history cannot be rewritten. The Checkers are gone. And I do apologize for whatever role I may have played in bringing about this catastrophe.
Don’t hate me… please.
Come on, don’t throw my book in the garbage can. That’s not nice. Forgiveness is an important virtue, didn’t someone say that once?
Sorry… okay?
4 Celebrities (#u1e929d66-f408-5772-8f39-81c37a8f0f63)
Certainly one thing that has not changed is a scene such as this: two teenage girls and their mothers, Agogers (people who are ‘agog’) from Georgia on their first trip to New York, piled into my cab at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on a Saturday evening at 7.30 p.m., en route to the Broadway show Beauty and the Beast.
‘Hey,’ the teenager sitting beside me said as we hit traffic heading into Times Square, ‘have you ever had a celebrity in your taxi?’
‘Sure,’ I replied, ‘I’ve had lots of them.’
‘Really?!’
‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘I once had the man who co-wrote the songs of the show you’re going to see.’
‘Wow, what’s his name?’
‘Howard Ashman.’
No response. She’d never heard of the late, great lyricist.
‘Have you ever had a movie star?’
‘Sure.’
‘Wow! Really? You have? Who? Who?’
‘Well, I’ve had Lauren Bacall.’
No response. Obviously this girl was not a fan of classic cinema.
‘How about Leonardo DiCaprio?’ I replied, hoping to hit a home run.
‘Holy Jesus! Leonardo DiCaprio! In this cab?’ At which point all four of them began fondling the upholstery, hoping some of Leo’s charisma would rub off on them.
What is it about celebrities, anyway? Are they really any different than you and me? Well, in a sense, no. Their food goes in one end and comes out the other, just like everyone else’s (although it may start out as sushi from Nobu’s for them and a tuna melt from Frank’s deli for you and me). But the nature of the lives they are living is really quite different than any other type of person. For example…
Starlight
I was cruising down Columbus Avenue one evening in 1987 when I was hailed at 77
Street by a middle-aged man wearing a tuxedo. He opened the rear door, but instead of getting in, he leaned forward and inspected the condition of the compartment and picked up a couple of errant pieces of paper from the floorboard. Deciding that my taxi now met his high standards, he then asked me to wait a minute while he retrieved his friends from a restaurant on the avenue. One of his friends, he said, was a ‘major VIP’.
Well, my curiosity was certainly aroused. Who could this Very Important Person be? In a few moments the man in the tuxedo reappeared from the restaurant with another man, also wearing a tux, and two women in fashionable evening dresses. The cause of all the fuss, it turned out, was this other man. He was Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
It was a name you would recognize if you were past a certain age. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr, had been a movie star, a leading man, in the 1930s and was the son of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr, himself a big star from the silent movie era. I was familiar with Jr mostly because he was a pitch man for the wool industry and would appear in that capacity in television commercials.
We drove down Columbus Avenue a mere eleven blocks, to Lincoln Center. As Mr Fairbanks opened the door of my cab and stepped out into the plaza there, he was immediately surrounded by photographers snapping away, their strobe lights creating an explosion of brightness in the cool night air. He posed for the paparazzi, flashing a winning smile and looking altogether dapper. Apparently a special event of some kind was being held that night at Lincoln Center and the media were waiting for the stars to arrive.
After I drove away in anonymity, I had some thoughts about this phenomenon of celebrity. Consider this: although the glow of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr’s movie career had faded away nearly fifty years prior to that night, he was still being treated by the mortals around him with the care and adulation that you and I never receive for even a single day in our lives.
No, they are not the same as the rest of us. There is truly a phenomenon at work here. It’s like a force of nature, a type of energy. The physics of mass communications, if you will.
It can be interesting to observe how different celebrities deal with it. Some, like Douglas Fairbanks, Jr, are quite comfortable with it. Others, like John Lennon the two times I saw him on the street, resist it by trying to remain unrecognized behind dark glasses, scarves and various disguises. And then there are those who, like rodeo cowboys riding on the back of a bull, can’t seem to get enough of it and will go out of their way to let you know who they are.
Leonardo Di who?
One pleasant Tuesday night in the summer of 1996 I found myself waiting once again in the taxi queue in front of the Bowery Bar in the East Village. The popular Tuesday night party Beige was in full swing there and it was a good place to get a fare during an otherwise slow night shift.
I finally got to the front of the line when a group of rowdy kids, probably too young to have been in there in the first place, emerged from the bar, playfully pushing and shoving each other as they approached my cab. Other than the fact that they were loud and goofing around, I noticed three things: 1) one of them was smoking a cigar that was bigger than his face, 2) one of them was a model-gorgeous female and the others were all guys, and 3) there were five of them.
Now there were two problems here. Cigars, of course, are a no-no in a taxicab. And New York City taxis by law are only allowed to carry four passengers. But this group was probably drunk, definitely raucous and they had jumped into my cab so quickly that I decided that playing taxicab cop was too much of an effort and decided to just drive them where they wanted to go without a protest. Three of the guys and the girl crammed themselves onto the back seat and a fellow who must have weighed in excess of three hundred pounds joined me in the front. And off we went.
Our destination was a club called Spyon Greene Street in Soho, a short ride. I opened the windows to allow for some ventilation of the cigar smoke and was being pretty much oblivious to the laughter and clamor surrounding me when a male voice from the back seat suddenly grabbed my attention.
‘Hey, driver,’ the voice said.
‘Yeah?’ I called back.
‘Hey, you know, this is Leonardo DiCaprio you’ve got back here!’
‘It is?’
‘Yeah!’
‘Leonardo Di who?’
‘Leonardo DiCaprio!’
‘So – who is Leonardo DiCaprio?’ I asked. This was before Titanic and I’d never heard of him.
A second voice belonging to the blond-haired kid smoking the cigar now joined in the conversation.
‘Don’t you know who I am?’ he cried out.
‘Uhhh… nooo…’
‘I’m an actor, man!’
‘Oh.’
‘Did you see This Boy’s Life?’ he asked.
‘Oh, I’ve heard of that movie,’ I said, ‘but I haven’t seen it. You were in that?’
‘I played with De Niro, man!’
‘Wow! Really!’
‘How about What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? Did you see that?’
‘No, sorry, I didn’t see that one, either. You were in that?’
‘Yeah!’
I was certainly out of the loop. I would have liked to have discussed some of his work with him, but I hadn’t seen any of the kid’s movies.
‘Are you in anything that’s coming out soon?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, we just finished Romeo and Juliet,’ he said.
Well, here was something we could talk about. I know my Romeo and Juliet well and a lively conversation ensued between the two of us about this new version.
‘Who plays Mercutio?’ I wanted to know. ‘Who plays Tybalt? It’s set in modern times? Really! Hmmm… I wonder if that will work,’ and so on.
Our discussion continued until we arrived at Spy. As everyone else piled out of the cab, Leonardo DiWho surprised me. He stayed inside and started asking me questions about what it’s like to be a taxi driver.
Now, this impressed me – a lot. It brought to mind the difference between interesting versus interested. I don’t think there’s anything wrong about trying to be interesting, but I think it’s more admirable by far to be interested. For one thing, being interested makes you smarter. You will learn things by being interested. And, in addition to that, being interested gives the people you are talking to the feeling that they are important and that you care about them. It bolsters their self-esteem and makes them stronger. In my opinion, simply being interested is one of humanity’s most noble virtues. It doesn’t have to be a dog eat dog world.
So here was this kid smoking a cigar, a movie star, who you might expect to be the epitome of being interesting, instead turning the tables and being interested. What a breath of fresh air.
‘Who was the biggest celebrity tipper you ever had in your cab?’ he asked me.
‘Believe it or not, it was John McEnroe,’ I replied. ‘He gave me double the meter.’
‘Well,’ Leonardo DiWho said, ‘I’m gonna give you triple the meter!’
And he did.
I had a feeling this kid was going places and I didn’t want to forget his name, so I wrote it down on my trip sheet. My daughter, Suzy, was fourteen at the time and I’d never once been able to impress her by dropping the names of any of the celebrities I’ve had in my cab. Nevertheless, when I saw Suzy the next day, I told her I had a celebrity in my cab the previous night.
Looking down at my trip sheet, I read the name with some difficulty.
‘Have you ever heard of this guy… Leonardo… Di… uh… Cap… rio?’
A shriek came out of the mouth of my daughter that nearly shattered the wine glasses in the cabinet. This was followed by moans of the deepest anguish when it was learned that I had failed to obtain his autograph, a sin for which I have never been forgiven.
Oh, yes. She knew who he was.
Another question I’m frequently asked is, ‘How many celebrities have you had in your cab?’ I’ve wondered about this myself, so I made a list of every celebrity, big or small, I could think of who’d ever climbed into the back seat. By ‘big’ I mean a major star, like Leonardo DiCaprio. ‘Small’ would be someone who is known only locally, like a radio DJ or broadcast news personality.
The grand total, as of this writing, is 114. Some of these celebrities I’ve had more than once (Dick Clark – three times!), so if I counted each time that happened the total would be 122. And if I were able to count the ones I didn’t recognize, I’m sure the number would be God knows how many. But however you look at it, it’s a lot of celebs. So many, in fact, that it lends itself to categorization. Here are some of the stand outs:
Movie Stars – 17 – Lauren Bacall, Sean Penn, Dennis Hopper, Jane Seymour, Richard Dreyfuss, Robin Williams, Matt Dillon, Dan Aykroyd, Eli Wallach, Kevin Kline, Bill Pullman, Diane Keaton, Carroll O’Connor, Kevin Bacon, Tom Hulce, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr and, of course, Leo.
Pop Music Stars – 9 – Ray Davies (The Kinks), Johnny Rzeznik (Goo Goo Dolls), Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, Carly Simon, Diahann Carroll, Gregg Allman, Derek Trucks, James Taylor.
Crooners – 3 – Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Jr, Eddie Fisher.
Folk Singers – 3 – Peter Yarrow (Peter, Paul and Mary), Suzanne Vega, Richie Havens.
Famous Writers – 5 – Norman Mailer, Jimmy Breslin, Harrison Salisbury, Rex Reed, Liz Smith.
Offspring of Celebrities Who Are Celebrities Themselves – 4 – Caroline Kennedy, Lucie Arnez, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr, Steven Mailer (son of Norman).
Talk Show Hosts – 3 – Dick Cavett, David Susskind, Tom Snyder.
Band Leaders of Late-Night Talk Shows – 2 – Paul Schaeffer (Letterman), Max Weinberg (Conan O’Brian).
Big-Time Businessmen Who Named Their Companies After Themselves – 2 – Leon Hess (Hess Oil and owner of the NY Jets football team), Frank (‘it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken’) Purdue.Writers of Famous Christmas Songs – 2 – Mel Tormé (‘The Christmas Song’, aka ‘Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire’), J. Fred Coots (‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’).
Porn Stars – 3 – Hyapatia Lee, Sharon Mitchell, Cara Lott.
Mick Jagger Exes – 2 – Marianne Faithfull, Bianca Jagger.
Fugitive Hippies – 1 – Abbie Hoffman.
That’s right. I had a famous fugitive hippie in my cab, and there aren’t too many of those around. Or perhaps I should say a ‘former’fugitive hippie…
Abbie Hoffman
I was cruising up 8
Avenue one night in February, 1982, when I was hailed by two men on the street. One was a normal-looking, forty-something fellow and the other turned out to be a dark-haired, raving motormouth who spoke to his traveling companion in a semi-hysterical rant without giving him a chance to get a word in edgewise. We continued up 8
Avenue to Central Park West until we reached 65
Street, where the man with the obsessive outflow got out of the cab, leaving the other passenger with me. I turned right onto transverse and we proceeded across the park to the East Side.
‘That was Abbie Hoffman,’ the man said. ‘I’m his parole officer.’
Abbie Hoffman, if you’re too young to remember him, was an iconic counter-culture figure from the ’60s. He founded the Youth International Party (the “Yippies”) and received vast amounts of publicity by engineering stunts and demonstrations which mocked some of the dubious values of American society. He had been convicted of dealing cocaine in 1973 and became a fugitive until 1980, when he re-emerged and served a brief prison term.
It was a surprise and something of a revelation to be able to be a ‘fly on the wall’ during this ride. A surprise because Abbie Hoffman had seemed to me to be something of a folk legend, more like a Johnny Appleseed or a Paul Bunyon than a real person. Yet there he was.
And a revelation to observe the condition he was actually in. I was saddened but not altogether surprised several years later to learn that he had committed suicide.
However, it is another iconic personage from the ’60s (and beyond) who is the answer to this frequently asked question: ‘Of all the celebrities you’ve had in your cab, which one is your favorite?’
Paul Simon’s warmth
On two occasions I have been honored to transport the derriere of the great Paul Simon in my taxicab. The composer of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, ‘Mrs, Robinson’, ‘The Boxer’ and so many other wonderful songs, Paul Simon is someone who I can truly say has enriched my life through his music. It can be a little overwhelming, however, to meet someone in person whom you have admired for so long. What do you say to a living legend? What, when you find yourself suddenly face to face with such a larger-than-life character, do you talk about?
Why, baseball, of course.
I was heading uptown on Central Park West on a lovely day in June, 1983, looking for my next passenger, when I spotted him standing there with a doorman on the opposite side of the street. They both had an ‘I want a cab’ expression on their faces which I took as my cue to make one of those sweeping U-turns that taxis in New York City are famous for. Taking care not to run over my favorite songwriter and thus bring to an end the long series of Simon and Garfunkel reunions, I pulled my cab around to where they were standing, and Paul got in.
He wanted to go to the East Side, so we headed through Central Park in that direction. I noticed Paul was wearing an unusual baseball cap with an insignia on it that I didn’t recognize so, seeking an entrance point from which to start a conversation, I asked him what his hat was all about. He told me it was a hat from a Japanese baseball team, that he’d ‘played a stadium over there’, and that the hat was a souvenir. I asked him jokingly which position he had played and, matching the spirit of my question, Paul replied that he’d played ‘guitar’.
I noticed that we had found some common ground upon which to communicate and that there was some rapport between us, so I decided to steer the discussion to an area of fertile soil when baseball is the subject of conversation in New York – the Yankees. I had heard or read somewhere that Paul was a Yankee fan, which might be expected of the person who wrote the line, ‘Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?’, and I was not wrong.
As our chat about the Yankees got going, I could see that Paul was emotionally involved with the franchise and its meaning to New York. He spoke knowledgeably about the players and the problems the organization was having. And he had nothing positive to say about George Steinbrenner, the owner of the team, or Billy Martin, who was in one of his many incarnations as the Yankee manager at the time, even going so far as saying that the two of them were not only bad for baseball, but bad for New York City as well.
I was quite impressed by the passion with which he spoke. It was obvious that baseball in general and the Yankees in particular were things that were important to him. So involved had Paul become in our discussion of the subject, in fact, that he stayed on in my cab for a minute after we reached his destination in order to wrap up the conversation – a great honor, from my point of view. Once he finally did leave I was left with the impression that in Paul’s world the travails of Julio down by the schoolyard and Cecilia up in his bedroom were of no more importance than the slings and arrows of Willie Randolph at second and Dave Winfield in right.
The memory of our conversation stayed with me for some time. I found myself wondering, whenever George or Billy would make the news with some new blunder, what Paul would have said about it. He had become for me the conscience of the Yankees. And then one day, out of nowhere, an idea hit me with the impact of a Goose Gossage fastball: Paul Simon would make the perfect owner of the New York Yankees. A native New Yorker, a lifelong Yankee fan, an important contributor to the legacy of the team through his music, a caring, intelligent and disciplined person, and the possessor of some serious wealth – somehow it all just fit. Yes! Paul Simon, the one man who could rescue our Yankees from the tyranny of the wicked King George. I decided that if fate ever put Paul back in my cab, I would do my best to sell him on the idea.
As it turned out, fate was kind.
On an unusually frigid day in late November, 1984 – just a few weeks after the conclusion of yet another dismal baseball season for the Yankees – I again spotted Paul standing with his doorman at the same building on Central Park West. Once again I made an outrageous turn to get to him and, after refreshing his memory about our previous conversation, I wasted no time in getting to the matter at hand. I told him I had an idea that he’d probably think was crazy at first, but I wanted him to at least take a look at it. And then I laid it on him.
‘I want you to buy the Yankees,’ I said.
It certainly took him by surprise.
‘Me?You want me to buy the Yankees?’he said incredulously.
I told him it wasn’t as crazy as it sounds. A lot of things happen that seem bizarre until we get used to them. I told him he had some pretty good qualifications, having written that line about Joe DiMaggio, and being a native New Yorker, and all. I could see he was softening up on the idea. He started tossing the concept around in his mind. But he hit a snag right away.
‘I don’t have that kind of money,’ he said. ‘You should talk to McCartney.’
I took this as a minor stumbling block that any salesman would encounter en route to closing a deal. All I had to do was show my client that where there’s a will there’s a way. I asked him what he thought the team was worth. After giving it some thought he guessed that ninety or a hundred million dollars would do the trick. Arriving at this figure, however, was not something that helped my cause. But then I realized that what he’d given me was in sales parlance just an ‘illegitimate excuse’. Now it was my job to strip away all the illegitimate excuses until we came to what the real objection was, if, in fact, there was one. So I suggested setting up a consortium of investors with Paul as the principal owner.
‘What about Billy Joel?’ I asked.
‘Oh, yeah, he’s a big Yankee fan!’ Paul replied with genuine enthusiasm.
Now we were getting somewhere – the seed had been planted and was starting to grow. I could see in my mind the same image that I was sure was in Paul’s: a large conference room in Yankee Stadium, Paul sitting at the head of the table, Billy Joel at his side, and about twenty seats filled with rock singers and movie stars. A big decision had to be made: should Tommy John be offered a new contract even though he’s forty-one years old?
But Paul raised a new objection. He began talking, quite sincerely, about his basic purpose line. He’d always wanted to be a rock singer, he said, and that’s what he had dedicated himself to and had become. He told me that there had been times when he had considered doing things that would have been divergences from his purpose line, but they never came to anything, and that his steadfastness to his purpose was one of the reasons for his success. Although owning the Yankees sounded intriguing, it would ultimately be something that would take him away from his work.
As a salesman I had to consider this statement, convincing as it might sound, as just another illegitimate excuse and I went to work at chopping it down. My objective was to show Paul how owning the Yankees would actually enhance his basic purpose. I pointed out that buying the franchise would give him access to Yankee Stadium as a concert arena. He could book concerts, including himself as a solo artist and himself with Garfunkel, on dates when the Yankees were unlikely to draw large crowds. This concept seemed to sit well with him as he immediately started looking at what might stand in the way of his acquiring the team.
‘I don’t think George would ever sell,’ he said.
Now here, I had to admit, we had a formidable, perhaps even insurmountable, obstacle. What if it wasn’t a matter of money? What if the team simply wasn’t for sale at any price? It seemed that the only possibility of overcoming this barrier would be to solve the mystery of what it is that makes George tick. We went to work at it.
Why, we wondered, would George Steinbrenner want to be the owner of a baseball team, anyway? Was it because he loved baseball? Possibly, but we didn’t think so. Was it for the money? Again, this was possible but, knowing as much as we’ve all come to know about George, it didn’t seem to ring true that money would be his real motivation. What was concluded, after some discussion, was that George is a person who needs recognition and approval in a big way.
Now there could be various ways of achieving recognition and approval. Certainly one way was to become famous and loved as the owner of a baseball team. But there could be other ways, too… like performing in front of thousands of people and singing lively songs while a band plays behind you.
So there it was, the solution to the problem! Paul would put together a group of investors, the matter of the money would be resolved, and everyone would get what they want: Paul – the Yankees. George – well, first George will get training for his new career. Voice control, stage presence, a new wardrobe. And then, before you know it, the world will be enamored of, astonished by and delirious for the harmonies created by George and his new partner.
The group will be called Simon and Steinbrenner. Sorry, Art.
We had arrived at Paul’s destination, the Brill Building on Broadway and 49
. There was still one detail he had some attention on – the matter of contacting George, conducting the negotiations and closing the sale. It was something he didn’t particularly want to get involved in until it was really necessary. So Paul decided to offer me a deal.
‘Tell you what,’ he said as he started to step out of my cab into the freezing afternoon air, ‘if you can get George to sign the papers, I’ll give you a percentage.’
And with that he smiled, waved goodbye, and went on his way.
I drove less than a block down Broadway, already doing the math in my head of what a percentage would bring me, when my next passenger, a middle-aged woman, hailed me from the frozen street and jumped in. She sat in the same spot in back where Paul Simon had just been sitting.
‘Hey, you know who I just had in my cab?’ I said to her… ‘Paul Simon!’
‘You did?’ she said in amazement. She then started moving her body back and forth against the seat. ‘You mean I’m sitting in Paul Simon’s warmth?!’
A Woody Allen story
Of all the celebrities in New York, I don’t think there is any who is as much identified with the city nor as visible in the city as Woody Allen. I have often seen him around town – going into Knicks games at Madison Square Garden, directing or acting in his own movies on the street, or just walking around. It’s easy to spot him. He looks exactly the same in real life as he does on the screen.
He has also always been the most locatable celebrity in New York City. You always knew where this guy would be on a Monday night – at Michael’s Pub on 55
Street between 2
and 3
Avenues. For many years Woody played the clarinet in a Dixieland band there without ever missing a date. He was always there on Monday nights.
In 1977, for example, when the Academy Awards ceremonies were still being held on Mondays, Woody’s movie Annie Hall won Oscars for Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture. Was Woody in Hollywood to pick up his Oscar? No, he was playing the clarinet at Michael’s Pub.
It so happens that Michael’s Pub, before it moved in 1996, was situated on the ground floor of a high-rise office building that is occupied almost entirely by lawyers. Many of them work late so this building is an excellent place to look for a fare between the hours of seven and ten on any weeknight. If a taxi driver waits there for a few minutes between these hours, he will be sure to get a customer. Therefore I would often be there, and if it was a Monday night I’d always wonder if I would be seeing Woody Allen.
At 9.25 p.m. he would come out of the place. It was that predictable. Sometimes he’d be alone, sometimes he’d be with Soon-Yi, sometimes with his father. He had a Mercedes and a driver waiting for him. If people gathered around him and asked him to pose for a photograph, he would oblige for a minute and then his driver, in what appeared to be a rehearsed drill, would wrench him away and usher him into his car. I saw this many times and I always considered it to be a treat, one of those special, little New York experiences. And there was an additional treat from a business point of view. The people who had come to Michael’s Pub to see Woody Allen would also become taxi customers, so adding them onto the lawyers made Monday nights even better over there. For some reason nearly all of them were Europeans, usually from France, Denmark, Sweden, Germany or Holland. I supposed that Woody was big in those countries and apparently it was well known that you could see him in person at this particular location. Perhaps it was even better known over there than it was here, because my passengers were rarely Americans.
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